m 



MIBIO riCTORIS 




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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

BRm 

Wiap. Copyright No 

SlieIi:..,M-53 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



RELIGIO PICTORIS 

BY I^ELEN BIGELOW 



MERRIMAN 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

^f>t Hiiteriff'ide ^m^ Cambriiige 

MDCCGXCIX 



OCT171B90 



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COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY HELEN BIGELOW MERRIMAN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED 



SECOND COPY, 



43747 




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/ Dedicate This Book to My Husband 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION . • • • • I 

I. THE ENSEMBLE .... 7 

II. THE VALUES • • . • • 29 

III. INDIVIDUALITY . . . , 6 1 

IV. PERSONALITY . . . . . 81 
V. EXISTENCE AND RELATION . . • I05 

VI. RECOGNITION . . . . .14! 

VII. IMMORTAL LIFE .... 209 

CONCLUSION . . . . .219 



INTRODUCTION 



«*What will be the deepest, most useful, truest, 
most lasting form of philosophy ? Common sense 
idealized, or rather a meeting of common sense and 
metaphysics well expressed by Coleridge, ' Common 
sense is intolerable when not based upon metaphysics.' 
But are not metaphysics intolerable when not based 
upon conmion sense ? " — Life and Letters of Benja- 
min Jowetty vol.ii. p. 77. 




INTRODUCTION 

JMONG our books we have 
a "Religio Medici" and a 
"Religio Poetse," but not a 
Religio Pictoris, yet it may- 
be well that the painter 
should set forth the faith that is in him, 
because from the nature of his calling he 
has some special advantages for dealing 
with the deeper problems of life. 

The painter is bound both to the ideal 
and the actual, and cannot separate him- 
self from either. He is thus obliged to 
take both sides of life into account. His 
work must consist in shaping concrete re- 
alities into some form of ideal expression. 
He may paint chairs and tables, rocks and 
streams, flesh and garments, but unless he 
can make these stir our feeling in some 
way he is only a maker of sign-boards. 
Thus by the very conditions of his art he 
is forced to ideality as the ordinary man 
is not. Natural objects are his alphabet and 
he must study them profoundly, but he 
must study them from the ideal side and 
with the thought of expression always in 
mind. He is therefore not in bondage to 
them. 

The transmuting of the actual into the 

3 



ideal must take place in the painter's own 
personality. In this he differs from the 
scientist, who may content himself for a 
lifetime with merely observing and re- 
cording innumerable facts, trusting the fu- 
ture to marshal them into some ideal ex- 
pression. The training of science is thus 
impersonal, whereas personality is the chief 
equipment of the artist, and definite per- 
sonal expression his distinctive merit. In 
this of course he stands in the same cate- 
gory with the musician and the poet ; but 
because of the more practical nature of 
his art and the more solid materials he 
employs, he is less hkely than they to lose 
sight of the positive character of the ele- 
ments involved in his work. A piece of 
music may, without losing its value, be so 
far vague that different listeners interpret 
it in different ways. It is more an affair of 
moods than a picture is, both in the mak- 
ing and the appreciation of it. The painter, 
however, must render the very character, 
the stuff and quality, of the thing he paints, 
or his work is flimsy and valueless. He 
is thus compelled to respect the actual and 
to find individuality in all things. The 
more conscientiously determined the artist 
is to bring out the essence of the things he 
paints, the more he glories in this practical, 

4 



craftsmanlike side of his art, as opposed to 
the cheap idealism which has no firm basis 
in natural fact. He is therefore to some 
extent a scientist. 

We may say then, first, that the artist is 
pledged to idealism by his very vocation ; 
second, that he is constrained to make ac- 
count of the essential qualities of material 
things to a much greater extent than the 
musician or the poet; and third, that in 
common with the musician and the poet 
it is his personality that gives expression 
to the elements widi which he deals. 

In all this the artist's problem is similar 
to the problem of every human life. We 
are all, in our best desires at least, pledged 
to the ideal, the immortal. We reaUze if 
only dimly, that our life's work should be 
the shaping of the elements which go to 
make up our lives into some form of ideal 
expression. In trying to bring this about 
we are obliged to make very definite and 
respectful account of these elements. We 
think in the valor of our youth that we can 
grasp and mould Hfe to our will, but we 
learn at last by many defeats and much 
humbling of pride, how real and much 
to be respected in their actuality are the 
things we thought of in the beginning as 
mere pawns in our game. Moreover, as 

5 



with the artist, it is our personal quality 
that should mould our lives and give them 
value, but the sense of personality is some- 
what weak in these days. There is plenty 
of individuality, but it is unrelated and in- 
efficient. Because man's sense of his own 
personality is weak, he has but a feeble 
belief in the personality of God, for the 
two are intimately connected. Increasing 
knowledge of our environment is doubt- 
less responsible for this state of things. It 
is all so wonderful, and natural law is so 
great, that man is tempted to think of him- 
self as a product of circumstances, a tool 
of great forces, rather than a force in him- 
self. The modern mind is like an artist, 
if such a one could be found, who should 
paint the background of a portrait first, 
and then modify the face and figure of his 
sitter to harmonize with it. The folly of 
such procedure is so obvious to the true 
artist, his sense of his own personality and 
that of his sitter is so strong, that his un- 
written creed on this point, if we can grasp 
it, may reinforce in our thinking that per- 
sonal note, both human and divine, which 
is so much to be desired. 



I. THE ENSEMBLE 



*' Under the Arch of Life, where love and death. 
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw 
Beauty enthroned ; and though her gaze struck awe, 
I drew it in as simply as my breath: 
These are the eyes which, over and beneath. 
The sky and sea bend on thee, which can draw 
By sea or sky, or woman, to one law. 
The allotted bondsman of her palm and wreath. 

*' This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise 
Thy voice and hand shake still, long known to thee 
By flying hair, and fluttering hem — the beat 
Following her daily, of thy heart and feet. 
How passionately and irretrievably. 
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!'* 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, SouPs Beauty, 




L THE ENSEMBLE 

)HE artist like the poet is a 
creator, a maker, and the laws 
by which alone creative work 
may be achieved meet him at 
every turn, being illustrated in 
the representation of the simplest object, 
and moving before him like a pillar of 
cloud and fire whenever he advances into 
the untravelled regions of the ideal. It is to 
study these laws and to see what light they 
throw on problems deeper than those of the 
artist that this essay is written. 

Psychology is now studied so much from 
the physiological side that it may seem like 
going back to the dark ages to approach 
the subject from any teleological stand- 
point, and yet is it not conceivable that we 
may get some useful light on deep ques- 
tions if, assuming that man's highest duty 
is to help make the world in all good ways, 
we study the laws which regulate creative 
action as they find illustration in the work 
of the artist, or of any one who actually 
creates, if only in the limited fashion pos- 
sible to mortals, namely, the recombining 
of existing elements into new forms of 
personal expression? The milliner who 
trims a bonnet, the artisan who carves a 



chair, the housewife who makes a pudding, 
could really teach us the same lessons, for 
they all work under the same conditions of 
an ideal to strive for, materials more or less 
stubborn to handle, and a personal quality 
which determines the taste of their pro- 
ducts. Much is said in these days about 
handicraft, for people realize as never be- 
fore that the training of the hand is as es- 
sential to harmonious development as the 
training of the head. We are fast getting 
over the idea that a man's brain is the only 
aristocratic organ he possesses. We dis- 
count mere acquisition if it be not put to 
some constructive use, and all this shows 
an increasing appreciation of man's function 
as a maker; a function to which the exi- 
gencies of primitive life impel him without 
question, but which he is in some danger 
of forgetting when he is no longer under 
the pressure of an immediate relation be- 
tween his daily toil and his daily bread. 

The necessity to create is strong upon 
the artist because he sees with inner vision 
an ideal that he wishes to reproduce. He 
does not stop to reason about his materi- 
als, but bends them impetuously to his ser- 
vice. The average human being, on the 
contrary, lacking any well-defined inner 
vision, has little impulse to create. He 

lO 



goes on speculating about the contents of 
the world in which he finds himself, and 
fails to understand that material things 
will yield their final secret only to him 
who masterfully shapes them into noble 
life. 

Let us then study the artist's experience. 
There is one great temptation which be- 
sets every one who tries to draw. It meets 
the beginner in the schools and follows 
the master into the retirement of his stu- 
dio. It is so subtle and all-pervading that 
it reminds one of — if indeed it be not 
identical with — what theologians call " ori- 
ginal sin." This temptation lies in man's 
tendency to exaggerate the importance of 
details. 

The beginner clings to details because 
they seem to be within his reach, and he 
dares not trust himself to grasp the larger 
aspect of things. To do this always in- 
volves a certain letting go, and the begin- 
ner, in the rigidity of his conscientious 
effort, is determined to hold on. If he 
tries to draw an outline that is full of 
variety, like a range of mountains for in- 
stance, he is sure at first to exaggerate the 
subordinate ups and downs and so to pro- 
long the line beyond its proper length; 
and conversely, in drawing a full-length 
II 



figure for the first time, he will make the 
arms and legs too short because of the lack 
of incident in their lines. He is all the 
time on the look-out for another detail to 
grasp, and cannot trust himself to the long 
sweep. The perverse and overmastering 
tendency to exaggerate the importance of 
details leads many artists to work largely 
from memory, because, as in working from 
memory one can recall only the general 
impression, the non-essentials are sifted out. 
Corot said : " If you wish to paint a man's 
portrait, let him walk a few times across a 
doorway opening into a dark room, and 
then put down what you remember. If 
you have him seated before you, you will 
begin to paint his buttons." 

Infinite illustrations of this point might 
be given ; but let it suffice to say that it is 
the lifelong struggle of the artist to look 
at things in a large way, and to see the 
parts as related to the expression of the 
whole. The " ensemble " is what he strives 
to render. The need for this lies at the 
basis of all impressionism, not merely of 
the often exaggerated impressionist work 
of to-day, but of that sound doctrine of 
impressionism which is the only tenable 
ground of real art, and which asserts that 
we should paint, not things in themselves, 

12 



but things in their relation to one another 
as that relation impresses the mind of the 
artist. The relation is then the thing to 
be aimed at, and is a sufficiently definite 
thing to become the subject of a work of 
art. Of course the whole is really the 
subject, but the relations are its manifes- 
tation ; sunlight for instance, which is the 
subject of so many modern pictures, be- 
ing expressed only by an exquisite purity 
and delicacy of tone relations. 

To what can the artist trust to defend 
him from his innate tendency to exag- 
gerate the importance of details? He 
must have some help, for in addition to 
his natural aptitude for seeing the unim- 
portant, he is obliged frequently to make 
a prolonged study of minor facts in order 
that his picture may have an air of reality. 
If he would paint like Meissonier, he must 
master all details to perfection in order to 
put just as much or as little of them into 
his pictures as the subject demands-. What 
is to decide the amount of detail required 
in any given case ? What is to nerve the 
artist's hand as he bravely brushes out at 
one sweep the elaborate work of days, if he 
finds that it interferes with the clear expres- 
sion of his idea ? 

Nothing can do this for him but his sense 

13 



of the whole, and it is this sense in his spe- 
cial field that makes him an artist, and to 
which, if he have only the rudiments of it, 
he may safely trust in spite of his perverse 
natural tendency to overdo the parts. 

We may believe that a sense of the whole 
is the highest of human endowments. It 
enables a man to see the true relation of 
things and is the master word of life. All 
details fly to their places at its bidding. Its 
possessor swings great groups of facts into 
place while other men are painfully picking 
them up one at a time. In ethics it ap- 
pears as conscience, and even in small mat- 
ters it is man's best guide to success. We 
choose quickly between two carpets when 
we know the general style and coloring of 
the room we wish to furnish. A perception 
of the whole settles the matter rightly for 
us. A sense of the whole makes a great 
actor willing to subordinate and even efface 
himself when the general effect of the play 
requires it. Curiously enough, a man may 
have a sense of the whole in some special 
department and yet fail to possess it in that 
large way which would enable him to re- 
late this department to the whole of life. 
Mathematical and musical prodigies are in- 
stances of this. 

In practical ways we are constantly rely- 

14 



ing upon our sense of the whole as the 
basis of all proportion and the foundation 
of common sense, and besides this we have 
a dim perception of a unity of ideal beauty 
and goodness that shall complete our frag- 
mentary mortal existence. We dream of 
some vast symphony in which all created 
things shall play their happy concordant 
parts. Yet we treat this only as a dream, 
and let the near things take up our atten- 
tion, the daily duties tie us down. We 
lose our perspective, we revolve around 
some detail until we magnify it out of all 
due proportion and get our lives " out of 
keeping " or " out of drawing," as the artist 
would put it. It would not be difficult 
to show that ninety-nine hundredths, if not 
all, of our troubles come from this source ; 
for at the few times when we can " see life 
steadily and see it whole," our ordinary tri- 
als seem unimportant, and we feel a power 
to deal with them that we can never have 
while we are directly in their grasp. This 
power comes from seeing things in their 
right relation. The artist simply cannot 
paint his picture except in view of the 
whole. He must refer to it to correct his 
proceedings at every moment. Can we ex- 
pect to make good lives on any other basis ? 
But, it may be objected, the wholes per- 

15 



ceived by the artist are very limited, and 
offer no complete analogy for human life. 
We would like to keep to the true propor- 
tions of living, but how is the infinite 
Whole, so vague in its immensity, to de- 
cide them for us ? 

It is true that the wholes perceived by 
the artist are limited, yet if wholeness be, 
as we hope to show, a vital, essential quality, 
quite apart from the material of which 
any whole may be composed, it may, while 
in itself an abstract conception, reveal it- 
self through its working in some field like 
that of art, with sufficient clearness to be- 
come an object of scientific consideration 
and practical helpfulness. For the artist 
certainly, the whole, the ensemble of his pic- 
ture, is an active force, a despotic power, 
which, though it be but the child of his own 
brain, dictates to him just what tones, what 
forms, and how much detail shall go on to the 
canvas. He can strangle his offspring and 
destroy his picture, but if he wishes to paint 
any special subject that his mind conceives, 
certain elements must go to the making of 
it, and certain others, which in the begin- 
ning he may have thought of as belonging 
to his scheme, can have no part in the mat- 
ter. His infant, just bom, speaks back and 
dictates terms. Millet recognized this im- 
i6 



periousness of the ensemble when he said, 
" In a picture things should never have 
the air of being amalgamated by chance, 
but should have a strenuous and inevitable 
connection among themselves. I wish the 
beings that I represent to have the air of 
being vowed to their position. It must be 
impossible to imagine that the idea of being 
anything but what they are should enter 
their heads. A work ought to be all of one 
piece, and every person and thing in it 
should be there for a particular end." 

The artist, however irreverent he may be 
in some directions, always stands in awe 
before this element of his art, for it is just 
by heeding this law of the whole that he 
is able to embody that fragment of truth 
that may make him immortal. The pic- 
tures that he plans are his own creations 
in a sense, and yet, in another sense which 
every true artist would recognize, they are 
not his own at all ; that is, they are not the 
product of his mere individual industry, his 
concentrated will, his headstrong determi- 
nation. These, on the contrary, are the 
qualities which lead him to fasten upon de- 
tails, to overdo the unimportant, and gen- 
erally to get his work out of keeping. He 
is forced continually to draw back from all 
these, to refresh himself with a bath of pas- 

17 



sivity, to " go out and get a fresh eye/' or 
in some way to free himself from the thral- 
dom of his own intellectual activity, before 
the whole, in its serene calm and clear ex- 
pressiveness, will revisit his soul. Of course 
there are moments when the artist's intens- 
est activity and his purest perception be- 
come one, but these are moments of inspi- 
ration, and cannot be taken as his average 
mental condition. That the vision of the 
whole does come to him when he puts him- 
self in the right attitude, proves it his, yet 
not his to use selfishly and in an arbitrary 
spirit, because it is most often by letting 
go, stepping back from his work and ceas- 
ing his labors, that he invokes its presence. 
Nor will it visit the idler either in art 
or in life. It demand's man's utmost de- 
votion, it sends him to grapple with all 
details, it bids him labor unceasingly, yet in 
his labor to remember always that the things 
he does, he does not for their own sakes, but 
for the sake of the relation which they may 
bear to the perfect expression of some phase 
of the infinite Whole. Men have found it 
hard to write prose when speaking of the 
Whole, the subject is so inspiring. Ten- 
nyson sings its praises as the " Gleam," Ros- 
setti as "Soul's Beauty," Kipling as the 
" True Romance." The Hebrew poets, real- 
i8 



izing its power and majesty in the moral 
realm, sang it as the God of Israel whose real 
name was too awful to be taken on mor- 
tal lips. It is the great synthetic force of 
the universe, bringing things together by 
the highest law of their being, and so the 
foundation of all true poetry and of all per- 
fect life. 

We may now profitably inquire what 
wholeness is, what intrinsic quality charac- 
terizes all its embodiments from the great- 
est down to the least. 

Obviously wholeness is always due to a 
central idea, the parts, like the words in a 
sentence, gaining fresh meaning from the 
relation into which they are combined by 
a vigorous thought. That which is not so 
obvious, but which we hope to make clear, 
is the close connection that exists between 
wholeness and personality, if they be not in 
fact identical. If this can be demonstrated, 
we shall have in the quality of wholeness, 
reaching, as it does, from the highest to the 
lowest object that we can conceive of, an 
abstract universal element which binds to- 
gether in a living unity all the innumerable 
forms of its embodiment. To make this 
clear a careful study of personality is needed, 
and that is reserved for a later chapter. All 
we can do at this point is to show that be- 

19 



cause the wholes created by man are ex- 
pressions of his personality, therefore natu- 
ral objects, such as crystals, plants, animals, 
man himself indeed, which are each ob- 
viously based on some central idea, may 
be reasonably conceived as expressions 
of an all-embracing divine Personality, a 
wholeness that both generates and includes 
all other wholes. 

It is clear that all animals and plants are 
based on a central idea, for they are recog- 
nizable by certain definite relations of parts 
which characterize each species, so that we 
never mistake a cow for a horse, or an oak- 
tree for a willow, in spite of great individ- 
ual variations. These seem to carry the 
secret of their wholeness, their idea, wrapped 
up in themselves ; every one reproducing 
its own kind, every tree knowing the pre- 
cise angle at which its branches should 
leave the main trunk, every kitten the trick 
of chasing its own tail. This central idea 
seems to be the secret of their life and power 
of growth. 

To show that this central idea, which 
lies at the basis of each created thing, is an 
expression of personality, we must study 
the works of man, for in these it is easy to 
detect the personal quality. We have 
chosen the sphere of the artist as the field 
20 



of investigation because he is pledged to 
create wholes of an ideal nature, such as 
the life of man should be ; but the abstract 
quality of wholeness reaches down to the 
simplest most prosaic things, and may be 
predicated of any object shaped by intelli- 
gence with true adaptation of parts. A 
chum or a hairpin is as truly a whole as 
the Hermes of Praxiteles. We should not 
claim wholeness in any deep sense for a 
cupful of water or a cartload of sand, which 
are of uniform material throughout, and 
are held together and limited merely by 
the thing that contains them. The word 
" whole " is really applicable only to things 
in which a central idea limits the circum- 
ference, dominates the parts, and prescribes 
the relation in which the parts shall stand to 
each other. A well-organized business firm 
is a whole of this sort. 

Among things made by man, those low 
in the scale, such as implements and uten- 
sils, owe their existence to man's concep- 
tion of some definite human need to be 
served. The more simply and directly they 
answer this need the better they are. A 
spade, for instance, is a concrete expression 
of man's recognition of his need to dig, and 
a careful study of that need has resulted in 
his making, in all matters of weight, pro- 

21 



portion, and balance, as good a spade as it 
is possible to conceive of. The wholeness 
of a spade, then, is a personal expression of 
man's sense of human need in one direc- 
tion, and thus the ideal spade regulates all 
the parts that go to make up every one of 
the millions of spades that are turned out 
annually. Our point is simply that per- 
sonal expression is the basis of wholeness 
even in the simplest things, though when the 
expression is once perfected its form may 
be multiplied mechanically to an indefinite 
extent. 

When we rise a step in the scale, we 
come to dress, furniture, and buildings, and 
in these man's bare recognition of human 
needs is modified by his desire, in meeting 
those needs, to express also something of 
that sense of fine proportion and harmoni- 
ous color with which he finds himself en- 
dowed. Houses, furniture, and clothing 
of the higher grades are not made in great 
numbers after one pattern to the extent 
that tools are. More individuality is ex- 
pected in the designing of them. Their 
wholeness is still a personal expression, a 
recognition of need, but one into which an 
element of delight has entered, as in the airy 
caprice of an embroidery that adorns a robe, 
or a noble tower that soars to the sky, 

22 



pierced and fretted so exquisitely that the 
doves which circle round it seem to be a 
part of its legitimate ornament. 

When we come to works of high art, 
to the products of the painter and the 
sculptor, it is not necessary to defend our 
position that the quality of wholeness de- 
pends upon personal expression, because it 
is well recognized that it is the manifesta- 
tion of the artist's personality that alone 
gives value to any work of art. It is the 
thing as he sees it that he must paint or 
carve. The quality of wholeness, then, 
that which gives consistency and integrity 
to any object, certainly so far as the works 
of man are concerned, is personal expres- 
sion. It may be a personal expression of 
the race to which many individuals have 
contributed their mite, as in the shaping of 
our common tools, or it may be the more 
individual expression of some great creative 
mind like Pheidias or Shakespeare. 

Now, since the law of the whole is one 
law, universal in its action, these two classes 
of objects that we have been considering 
— first, natural forms, such as crystals, 
plants, and animals, and second, the crea- 
tions of man — may throw some light on 
each other. The first may show us what 
wholeness is, and the second, whose whole- 



ness we know to be due to our personal 
expression, may lead us to infer that the 
quality of wholeness, wherever we find it, 
is always an expression of personality. If 
this be true, we shall find not less person- 
ality throughout the universe and at its 
Source under this conception than under 
the old anthropomorphic one, but infinitely 
more. Personality in this view runs as a 
thread from the highest down to the low- 
est, and is everywhere the shaping force. 
Indeed, leaving the biologists to hunt for 
ultimate cells, we venture boldly to assert 
that complete, conscious, personal expres- 
sion, if it could be attained, would be per- 
fect life, and that therefore an effort towards 
such expression must be the constructive 
force in all the grades of life of which we 
have any knowledge. 

Of course there is a distinction between 
things shaped by man's personality and 
those shaped by that Infinite Personality, 
which we may postulate as expressing it- 
self in all inanimate nature, in plants and 
animals, and in the physical structure and 
life of man ; because these last, the higher 
of them at least, have life in a very differ- 
ent sense from that in which man's works 
may be said to live. But it is easy to see 
that as we rise in the scale even human 
24 



products take on a more vital quality. Tools 
exist, and so does a very bad landscape on 
the panel of an omnibus. It is undeniably 
there, but a noble paniting by Titian has 
life in a much higher sense. Furniture 
and buildings endure and are restored and 
cherished to length of days in proportion 
to their beauty and their fitness for the ob- 
ject for which they were designed, which 
fitness causes them to become almost a part 
of the life of man to which they have min- 
istered. When much love and thought go 
to the shaping of things, they make a lively 
claim on our regard. Works of art min- 
ister to some man's highest needs, and his 
gratitude rises to preserve them, so that 
they gain a species of immortality. It 
would be impossible to obliterate the Venus 
of Melos to-day. The proportions of the 
statue are so familiar, it exists in so many 
forms of reproduction, that its ideal whole- 
ness is safe forever from all the changes and 
chances of this mortal life. The same is 
true of the Parthenon, restored models of 
which are fast accumulating in our mu- 
seums, while the original is slowly crum- 
bling to dust. 

The fact that the creations of man gain 
in vital quality in proportion as they are 
definite personal expressions related to pro- 

25 



found personal needs, and receiving recog- 
nition as such, suggests the idea that recog- 
nition may have a larger part to play in life 
than generally has been supposed. This 
point will be taken up farther on. 

Confusion is apt to come into our think- 
ing when man himself is the whole under 
consideration, because he is both a product 
and a cause. He is a personal expression 
of the greatest Whole of all, but he is less 
impressed with this fact than with his own 
need for making some personal expression 
of himself He is slow to perceive that 
his true welfare lies in helping out the in- 
tent of the greater Whole by every means 
in his power. Religion and all the moral 
training of the race are but efforts to lead 
man to renounce his antagonism to the 
Whole. The struggle is long and diffi- 
cult, because the thing that he must hold 
in abeyance, in order that he may work 
with and not against the force that would 
shape him to higher ends, is that self-di- 
recting energy which raises him above the 
brutes, and which, when rightly trained, 
will enable him to move as joyously to- 
wards perfection as if all the colors on a 
painter's palette should go singing to their 
places in his picture. 

The plants and the brutes are very com- 
26 



plete expressions so far as they go, and are 
often more agreeable objects of contempla- 
tion than man, because of their complete- 
ness. Just because man's possibilities are 
so much greater, his incompleteness is more 
painful. A caged lion seems much grander 
than the crowd that gapes at him. The 
brutes fulfil the law of their being and at- 
tempt no more, but man has the law of the 
whole more deeply implanted in him than 
they. It is at once his greatest glory and 
his greatest danger. The power that moulds 
all things is in him, and he is conscious of 
it, and of his ability to wield his fragment 
of it so as to produce definite and calcu- 
lated results. The choice is always open 
to him whether he will use this power to 
thwart the expression of the greater Whole 
that is seeking manifestation through him, 
or whether he will work with that greater 
Whole to develop his own higher whole- 
ness or personality. He has infinite power 
to make himself, his higher self, if he sets 
about it in as serious and business-like a 
fashion as the artist sets about his work. 
He can also do much to develop plants 
and animals beyond their natural condi- 
tion, but in both these efforts he must work 
with constant reference to the law of the 
whole, and not permit his individual frag- 
27 



ment of it to blind his eyes to its larger 
bearings. 

So great is the power of wholeness in the 
abstract that unity seems to have a certain 
morality of its own which confuses our 
ordinary standards of right and wrong. A 
very bad man often has great fascination 
for us because he is so consistent with him- 
self; because he relates everything so vig- 
orously to one unquestioned aim - — his own 
pleasure. We know that his deeds are 
evil, yet the unity which binds them to- 
gether has a charm for us which we cannot 
quite explain until we see that a higher 
application of the same law which gives 
him whatever attractiveness he has will 
inevitably bring him to confusion in the 
end. The plausibility of the doctrine of 
" art for art's sake " is another instance of 
the temporary sanction imparted by unity 
when conceived without reference to the 
source which empowers it. 



28 



II. THE VALUES 



** I have within me a belief that art is the love of 
certain balanced proportions and relations which the 
mind likes to discover and to bring out in what it 
deals with, be it thought or the actions of men, or the 
influences of nature, or the material things in which 
necessity makes it to work. I should then expand this 
idea until it stretched from the patterns of earliest pot- 
tery to the harmony of the lines of Homer. Then I 
should say that in our plastic arts the relations of lines 
and spaces are, in my belief, the first and earliest de- 
sires, and again I should have to say that, in my un- 
expressed faith, these needs are as needs of the soul, 
and echoes of the laws of the universe seen and un- 
seen, reflections of the universal mathematics, cadences 
of the ancient music of the spheres." — John Lafarge, 
An Artistes Letters from Japan. 




II. THE VALUES 

W we are to work with constant 
reference to the law of the 
whole, it is important that we 
should know just what this 
law practically is, so that we 
can understand something of its conditions 
and rewards, and we cannot learn this in 
any better way than by going back to its 
exemplification in the field of art. 

We have said that every whole that de- 
serves the name has a certain organic qual- 
ity. In other words, it is made up of op- 
posed and contrasting elements, which have 
their places assigned to them and are held 
together by some idea to be expressed, and 
this is nowhere more true than in a picture. 
Sometimes the contrasting elements are 
many, but they can always be reduced to 
a pair, and it is well to do this for clear- 
ness in thinking. In fact, we grasp the 
true nature of any whole only when we 
accomplish this reduction. Take the No- 
vember landscape, for instance. There are 
the rocks and tree trunks, the sere earth, 
the dying oak leaves, the lowering clouds, 
the early sunsets. All of these in a thou- 
sand different combinations would tell the 
same story, but the secret of the Novem- 

31 



ber whole, from the point of view of a pic- 
ture, lies in the broad relation between the 
grays and browns that sum up its color 
scheme. When the artist has grasped this, 
and has seen how the blue grays of the low- 
hanging clouds are allied to the greener 
grays of rocks and tree trunks, and how to- 
gether they form great masses of contrast 
to the brown earth with its tawny grasses 
and the reddish brown of the oak leaves, 
— and when he further appreciates how 
this contrast is focused by the glowing bar 
of orange light low in the west against the 
sombre purple of the hills, — then he has 
the essential features of the subject in his 
grasp and can reproduce and vary it at will. 
Superficially the elements that go to 
make up any whole may be very numer- 
ous, and in modern art and literature we 
find a disposition to confuse the simplicity 
of the major contrast; but just because of 
this confusion our modern work lacks great- 
ness. The major contrast is the real mean- 
ing of the thing. In an outline drawing 
for instance, we have perpendicular and 
horizontal lines as the primary sources of 
contrast. These are both merely phases 
of the straight line, the simplest mark that 
a human being can make. Divide it, set- 
ting the two parts at right angles to each 
32 



other, and they form a cross. Slightly 
modified, they may express a level plain 
and the trunk of a tree growing upon it. 
Ideally, they suggest repose and aspira- 
tion, the calm of the universal, the restless- 
ness of the individual. Through all their 
modifications into slants and curves their 
prevailing characteristics can still be di- 
vided into two groups, one of which most 
closely approaches the horizontal and the 
other the perpendicular. It is not until we 
come to the circle that the two individual 
directions become indistinguishable. In a 
finished picture the perpendicular and hori- 
zontal lines are so clothed and disguised 
that one is almost unconscious of them, but 
they lie at the base of all the rest, and their 
relation to each other gives the main char- 
acter to the work, just as in architecture 
the mutual adjustment of perpendicular and 
horizontal elements gives us all the types 
of dwelling fi-om the French chateau, with 
its prevailing upright lines and turreted 
corners, to the Mexican posada, with its 
level forms that follow the ground line. 
Just because of our tendency to see details 
first, and to regard the complex rather than 
the simple, we are ofi:en unconscious of the 
basic major contrast in any whole that we 
contemplate. We attribute the charm of 

33 



a room to its color and furnishing, when 
really its main beauty lies in its good pro- 
portions, and we confuse all our living by 
forgetting that the deepest and necessarily 
most controlling relation is always that be- 
tween man and God. 

In all these cases we must note that the 
opposition or contrast between the funda- 
mental elements is really a relation, because 
by their very opposition they enable us to 
express an idea. The same is true of all 
the contrasting pairs that may add richness 
to a picture when its skeleton has been 
constructed on perpendicular and horizon- 
tal lines. Light and shade, for instance, 
give us an added means of expression, and 
enable us to show the bulk of things and 
their distance from us, and to point out the 
source of light. Color adds a further com- 
plication, and at the same time a further 
richness to the work. All colors can be di- 
vided into two groups, of warm and cold, — 
the first starting with red, the last with blue, 
— and each separate color has its warm and 
its cold phase. Reds may incline either 
towards orange or violet, and blues towards 
turquoise or purple. Thus each member 
of any pair of opposites has, along with its 
own marked individuality, great capacity 
for approaching the other. 

34 



It would be easy to make a parallel state- 
ment about music, in which high and low 
notes, major and minor keys, fast and slow 
time, soft and loud execution, furnish the 
means of expression, but for the sake of 
simplicity we will keep to our chosen field 
of painting. Here we may say that for 
the making of a whole, that is, for the clear 
expression of an artistic idea, two opposing 
elements are required. The expression of 
the idea, in fact the idea itself, seems to be 
the resolution of this opposition through 
some charming sequences of form and color 
suggested by the personality of the artist. 
This, at least, is sufficient to constitute a 
picture in the purely artistic sense. We 
may say then, that the law of the whole, 
as it meets us in picture-making, works to 
bring about a coherent adjustment of two 
diverse and apparently opposing elements 
under the guidance of a leading idea, and 
this is equally true whether the artist is 
striving to express some idea of his own, 
or whether he is merely trying to set forth 
the idea, /. ^., the essential character, of some 
object or person that he wishes to portray. 

In both cases the law of the whole will 
demand sacrifice. Mutual adjustment of 
opposing elements cannot take place with- 
out it, and the artist will ask it unhesitat- 

3S 



ingly of the elements that are to compose 
his picture, and will learn to render it in 
his own person when he meets the law of 
the whole as embodied in some object that 
he wishes to represent. This latter asser- 
tion can be proved from experience, for 
when the element of portraiture comes in 
and we wish to express a special place, a 
particular hour of the day, a peculiar state 
of the atmosphere, or the face and carriage 
of a person, a problem is set before us in 
very definite shape. Certain relations of 
the elements with which we work will do 
this thing for us, others will not, and we 
must humbly set ourselves under the guid- 
ance of the whole to find out which the 
right ones are. William Hunt used to 
say that it was not until he got down and 
crawled that he could make any headway 
on a portrait. 

Suppose the subject to be a child with 
red hair, dressed in white, and standing, 
with a black dog in her arms, against a 
background of green. We will imagine, 
for the sake of simplicity, that the portrait 
is to be drawn in charcoal on a sheet of 
white paper. These two elements are our 
means of expression, giving us velvety 
black at one end of the scale, white at the 
other, and between them an almost infinite 

36 



gamut of gray tones. This richness of re- 
source among the grays gives us at first a 
great sense of freedom. There seem to be 
shades enough to do anything with, and 
we go bravely to work on the dress per- 
haps, delighting in every frill and fold, and 
employing, in our desire to do full justice 
to these, any number of tones of gray. 
The result is sure to be unfortunate. We 
may succeed fairly in representing the su- 
perficial elements of the dress, but we find, 
on stepping back for a general survey of 
the picture, that it is not a white dress at 
all ! We have brought so many dark tones 
into it that it no longer makes a white spot 
in relation to the rest of the picture. We 
may have the same experience in drawing 
the dog. An excessive conscientiousness 
in rendering his fur will be sure to lead us 
to use gray tones so high in the scale as to 
impair its general effect of blackness. If, 
somewhat shaken in our first confidence, 
we go to work in a different spirit, less 
officious, if we may use such a phrase in 
speaking of drawing, relying more on a 
kind of vision that seems to have its seat 
at the back of the head rather than in the 
eyes, we leam by degrees that the large, 
simple masses are to be looked for first, 
and secured at all hazards ; that it is the 

37 



relation of these masses to one another that 
really makes the picture, and that detail is 
secondary in importance, even fatal to the 
general effect unless kept within its proper 
mass. 

We must first establish the main values, 
making a black spot for the dog, leaving 
the white paper to stand for the dress, and 
summing up face, hair, and background in 
one gray tint which we shall later slightly 
differentiate into three masses, — the face 
being the lightest, the hair the darkest, and 
the background intermediate. By setting 
down the great divisions first, we have ac- 
knowledged the law of the whole, and un- 
der that law we may now go on to put just 
as much refinement of detail and individual 
character of feature, texture, and fur as our 
medium will admit of, into each of these 
divisions, provided that we do not disturb 
the main masses and so break up the very 
foundations of the picture. Nor do we es- 
cape the law of the whole here, for it is only 
by rendering within the masses the precise 
relations of line and tone, that we can give 
any individual quality whatever. These 
relations, or values^ as they are called, alone 
enable us to show whether the dress be of 
satin or muslin, whether the hair be straight 
or curly, and how all the subtle planes and 

38 



curves of the face are adjusted in the ex- 
pression of character. All this is done in 
the same way, by the relating of one part to 
another, and the suppression often of things 
that at the beginning specially caught our 
attention. There is a certain place in a 
portrait where the light of the cheek runs up 
under and behind the eye on the shadow 
side of the face, which a beginner will be 
sure to exaggerate so that it will stand out 
like a beacon fire and destroy all the fair 
roundness and sweep of the whole. We 
learn at last that it is not what we see when 
we look hard and fixedly at an object 
that we must paint, but those larger rela- 
tions which escape us in our moments of 
close scrutiny, but take shape again for us 
when we withdraw a little and trust our 
impressions of the whole. Of course a 
master of his craft like Velasquez, or Sar- 
gent among moderns, has learned never to 
look at things artistically except as wholes, 
and the impressions of these men are re- 
ceived and recorded by them so fluently 
that their pictures have almost a narrative 
quality. 

The artist may tell us, especially in these 
days of realism, that he thinks of the rela- 
tion of the parts to one another rather than 
of the whole which lies back of and de- 

Z9 



termines this relation. Nevertheless the 
whole is there, and to it whatever beauty 
and coherence may be found among the 
parts is due. We may note in this con- 
nection that there seem always to be two 
phases of man's sense of the whole. He 
may have a perception of some end to be 
attained so clear and definite that it deter- 
mines beyond question the right relation 
of everything that contributes to it. In 
this case he thinks of the whole rather than 
of the relations, because the latter are im- 
plied in the former. This was probably 
the case in the great days of art. On the 
other hand, a person may simply have an 
innate sense of right relation, and thus 
may be moved by the spirit of wholeness 
widiout seeing clearly the whole of which 
these right relations prophesy. Such a per- 
son will think of style and quality rather 
than of results, and such preoccupation is, 
as we have said, characteristic of modern 
art. There seem to be two types of mind, 
one of which is attracted, like Emerson 
or Amiel, by the scintillation of separate 
truths, special relations exquisitely per- 
ceived, and another which inevitably seeks 
for the underlying system, the including 
whole. 

Sometimes the two phases are united in 
40 



the same person, but more commonly one 
exists at the expense of the other. The 
distinction between these two phases will 
be recalled many times in the succeeding 
pages. For the present it suffices to point 
it out, and to say that however much the 
two phases may clash, they are really but 
different manifestations of that sense of the 
whole which is man's highest possession. 
In general, however, when we speak of a 
sense of the whole we mean the first of the 
two phases. Being a sense of the whole, 
it is definite, determining, and therefore 
powerful, whereas the spirit of right rela- 
tion, although beautiful in itself, because 
it refers us only to some whole, is vague 
and often unreliable. It is a matter of in- 
stinct, rather than of clear and reasonable 
perception. But however this may be, 
every artist will agree that the truth and 
beauty, the life of a picture, depends upon 
a right relation between the whole and the 
parts ; and as it requires a supreme effort 
to grasp both of these at once, the advice 
of painters varies as to whether it is best to 
attack a subject from the point of view of 
the parts or of the whole. The accepted 
method has been, as we have described, to 
begin with the general effect, getting all 
the main masses in place before any detail 
41 



is attempted ; but some modem artists ad- 
vocate painting completely a strip, perhaps 
four inches wide, across the top of the can- 
vas in which each detail shall be given in 
precisely its right relations and fully fin- 
ished in one day, and the next day paint- 
ing a succeeding strip below, and so on 
until the canvas is covered. This practice 
does not do away with the paramount im- 
portance of the whole, but it forces the ar- 
tist to keep that whole steadily in his own 
mind, and never relax his grasp of it in 
painting the smallest detail, and this argues 
a very wide-awake mental condition. Both 
methods have their advantages. It may 
be said, looking at modern art broadly, that 
it inclines, in common with literature, phi- 
losophy, and all other expressions of the 
Zeitgeist^ to take more note of relative 
values than of the whole that lies back of 
them ; that it lives by the spirit rather than 
by the law of the whole. It prefers crea- 
tion to restriction, and does not yet see that 
only through limitation can it become in 
the largest sense creative. 

The teaching of art has made great 
strides within the last twenty years. Pupils 
are now taught from the beginning to look 
for the character and life of their subjects. 
It is hard to believe that within the mem- 
42 



ory of the present generation there was a 
drawing master who taught his pupils that 
the best way to represent fohage was to 
make a letter m and then a figure 3 joined 
on to it, and repeat this until the necessary 
space was covered. We can all see the ab- 
surdity of this in art ; and yet, for we must 
remember that we are using art here merely 
as an analogy, is not this a good deal the 
way we do in our own lives ? We go on 
making letter m's and figure 3's to the end 
of the chapter, if circumstances will allow 
us to do so. We love to get our lives into 
some routine that saves us from thinking 
or feeling over much. We dislike to 
open them to the searching criticism of the 
whole, and let that show us how absurdly 
out of relation much of our busy preoccu- 
pation and even much of our so-called 
philanthropy is. But the artist knows that 
he can paint his picture on no other terms. 
The whole, and only the whole, can guide 
him to the right adjustment of all the val- 
ues in his picture. It alone can show him 
which details are non-essential, and can 
therefore be sacrificed. 

Of course this line of argument will ap- 
peal only to those whose most earnest de- 
sire is to make excellent things, to become 
positive forces for good in the world. For 

43 



those who have no ambition of this sort 
the reasoning here set forth can have no 
possible interest. But there are many per- 
sons who would never voluntarily do wrong, 
but who are puzzled to choose between 
the different kinds of right that life offers, 
who long for some scheme of proportions 
that shall give consistency and coherence 
to their living. These may find help by 
studying the law of the whole. 

What then, so far as we can define it 
practically, is the law of the whole as the 
artist meets it in the practice of his art ? 
It is first of all acceptance of limitation, 
obedience, subordination. These are the 
very bone and sinew of the whole. 

We have seen that the artist cannot use 
all the shades of gray at his command if 
he wishes to represent a white dress. If he 
uses too many shades of gray, the dress 
will not be white. He must limit himself 
to a very few light tones which shall main- 
tain the whiteness of the dress in relation 
to the rest of the picture, because the dress 
exists as a white dress in that picture only 
by virtue of that larger relation. All detail 
that he wishes to put into the dress must 
be given by finer subdivisions of these 
light tones than he had at first thought pos- 
sible. Thus one working of the law of the 

44 



whole is to drive us to finer and more subtle 
issues. 

Acceptance of limitation by the artist, 
as with all of us, involves more or less sac- 
rifice of his natural methods. He thinks 
that he will secure fineness and subtlety 
by elaborating detail from the start, but 
he soon finds that this method is disastrous, 
and that he must content himself at first 
with seeking for the large relations, and ex- 
pressing these with simplicity. Later, if 
he desires to put in details, he does it by 
refining upon, and causing to vibrate, as it 
were, tones that to his coarse, earlier per- 
ceptions had seemed quite incapable of 
subdivision. Details are permitted him at 
last, but only on terms prescribed by the 
ensemble, and the result of working on 
these terms is always to introduce vitality 
and contrasted relations where before there 
was only dead uniformity. This we may 
note in passing as one more proof that the 
law of the whole always works to increase 
the sum of vitality in things, and is there- 
fore a law of life. 

Obedience to law as the means of achieve- 
ment is constantly impressed on the artist 
in his work, and on one side the lesson is 
a hard one. He must suppress his natural 
inclination to begin with details, he must 

45 



trust constantly to a power behind his eyes 
to show him the true relation of one part 
of his work to another. Busy ofRciousness 
will avail him nothing. All this is, in ar- 
tistic directions, a sacrifice of self When, 
however, he has accepted the law of the 
whole and identified himself with it by 
means of such sacrifice, he finds in it a won- 
der-working power. He has discovered 
that he cannot represent anything aright 
so long as he disregards the law of the 
whole, but when he has once accepted its 
principles, he finds that he can represent 
anything in the visible universe by means 
of them ; the spirit of the whole empowers 
him, and he feels a sense of infinite freedom 
and possibility. Thus the law of the whole 
appears to him under two aspects, — in one 
case that of a master, in another that of a 
helper, — but it is always the same law. 

In the considerations with which we are 
now engaged there is, as noted in the pre- 
vious chapter, a constant danger of confu- 
sion, because the law of the whole meets 
man on two sides. It requires the same 
things whether it works from without or 
from within him, but his attitude towards 
it differs so much under these two varying 
conditions that he is apt to rebel in one 
case against that which is his very life in 

46 



the other case, and it is therefore hard to 
persuade him that he is all the time under 
the action of one unvarying law. 

For further illustration of this we will go 
back to our study of picture-making. We 
have tried to show that a picture is always 
an adjustment of two contrasted elements, 
such as warm and cold colors, perpendic- 
ular and horizontal lines, etc., but in a 
much higher sense the same thing is true. 
Two purely ideal elements go to the mak- 
ing of every picture. These are, taking a 
portrait as an example, the artist's person- 
ality and the individual characteristics of 
the sitter. The first determines which of 
the many aspects of the subject shall be 
painted, and what treatment it shall re- 
ceive, and the last furnishes the artist with 
something definite and vitally interesting 
to work upon, and to which he must give 
respectful attention if he would make the 
portrait a success. The proportion in 
which these two elements are combined 
varies in different portraits. An artist may 
be merely a servile copyist of features, or 
he may hastily fling his impressions of 
other persons on to canvas without study- 
ing them deeply enough to find out whether 
these impressions are profoundly just. The 
great portrait painter combines the two 

47 



qualities and is in the best sense an inter- 
preter, one who thoroughly understands his 
subject, and makes it more clear to the 
world than it could have been without the 
interposition of his personality. 

These two elements enter, not only into 
portraiture, but into any work of art. The 
artist stands in two attitudes towards his 
work, subjective and objective, — that of 
receiving impressions, and that of setting 
forth his personal recognition of them. The 
law of the whole meets him in both these 
attitudes, but it appears to him quite dif- 
ferently when it dictates terms of submis- 
sion if he would represent any object — as 
in the case of the white dress — and when 
he uses it freely and unconsciously, as em- 
bodied in himself, to express his original 
artistic ideas. 

We have said that limitation, subordina- 
tion, obedience, are the very bone and sinew 
of the whole. Its living constructive spirit 
is sacrifice, and this sacrifice appears to the 
artist as pain on the one hand and as power 
on the other. When limitation constrains 
him it is pain ; when it works for him it is 
power. The artist does not realize that it 
is by sacrifice that he attains his ends, but 
he never hesitates to destroy the work of 
days if it interferes with the clear expression 

48 



of his thought He subordinates one part 
of his picture to another unquestioningly ; 
he limits, defines, blends, expunges, and 
adjusts, in the enthusiasm of his idea, and 
never stops to think by what law he does 
it, because that law is embodied in him- 
self, is in fact his own personality. The 
very thing that as a beginner he struggled 
against now comes to work for him and per- 
forms miracles at his behest, vitalizing into 
expressiveness all the dead elements of his 
work. He rejoices in the limitation that 
at first oppressed him, as he brings his clear 
dark tones pungently against his light ones, 
and then leads them off into various phases 
of adjustment, all expressive, because all 
are duly related to the major contrast. 

From the foregoing considerations we 
may say that if the artist were a philosopher 
he could leam from different phases of his 
art two aspects of the whole that would 
throw light on each other. When engaged 
in representation, dealing with externals, he 
is most impressed by the demand for sacri- 
fice. When he works from within to ex- 
press his own ideas, he is most impressed by 
a sense of personality. The law is the same 
in both cases. Its personal quality is re- 
vealed to the artist through himself, its de- 
mand for sacrifice through his environment. 

49 



These two elements seem to be at war 
with one another; but we have seen that 
their co-working, as in a portrait, is the 
source of the best in art, just as the resolu- 
tion of oppositions on the various planes of 
form, color, light, and shade makes up the 
very substance of a picture. Artistic faith 
lies in the conviction that the opposition of 
all elements is only apparent, and exists to 
further the purposes of higher expression. 
The mutual relation of things is more ob- 
vious to the true artist than their opposi- 
tion because he is so pervaded by a sense 
of the whole. This leads him to rejoice in 
sacrifice as he relinquishes a lesser perfec- 
tion for the sake of a greater one, forbearing 
to make accurate account of the number 
of golden stamens in a water lily for in- 
stance, or to record the precise curves of its 
petals, that he may better render its glow- 
ing whiteness as it lies on the dark water 
and fearlessly opens its chalice to the sun- 
light, like the pure in heart who see God. 
Owing to the limitation of his material he 
cannot give all the qualities of the lily, so 
if he be wise he will prefer the deeper, 
more essential ones and let the others go. 
We all appreciate the beauty of the sacri- 
fice of the less to the greater enough to par- 
don incompleteness if it hints at a greater 
50 



possibility. A broken lamp-shade annoys 
us because completeness is one of the few 
perfections of which it is capable, but the 
fragmentary condition of the Nike of Sa- 
mothrace does not disturb us, because she 
hints at such splendor of beauty. The 
whole teaching of art is that beauty lies in 
right relation rather than in things in them- 
selves, and this is true in life as well. A 
very perfect dress may have actual beauty, 
yet if we know that it was paid for with 
money that should have gone to settle a 
long-standing grocer's bill, it looks posi- 
tively ugly to us. " The beautiful is the 
suitable," as Millet said. Each thing is 
beautiful only by virtue of its right relation 
to some larger whole of which it forms a 
part ; and this is so deeply true that things 
may almost be said to have a worthy ex- 
istence as minus quantities in any whole 
which is more complete without them. 

The law of the whole with the relations 
it prescribes cannot be of fundamental 
helpfulness to us unless we realize that it 
is a universal law, reaching from the far 
heights of the spiritual and moral realms 
down to our daily life with one omnipre- 
sent and most practical precept, that of sub- 
ordination, — the sacrifice of the less to the 
greater, — because only through the greater 

51 



can the real prosperity of the less be ob- 
tained. The pain that we feel at times in 
obeying this law becomes transfigured for us 
when we realize that by it we are linked to 
the greatest forces of earth or heaven. It 
makes all things one for us, and though it 
at first seems to diminish and limit us, we 
find in the end that it allies us with all that 
is most splendid and controlling. 

We have said that sacrifice under the 
guidance of the whole is constructive. 
Without such guidance it may be very 
much the reverse. In seeking the guid- 
ance of the whole we must always conceive 
it as the deepest, largest meaning which 
any collection of elements is capable of ex- 
pressing. The meaning must always be 
held as greater than any material whole in 
which it is embodied. The meaning is the 
life, the appeal for recognition by other 
wholes; and this, although we do not al- 
ways appreciate the fact, invariably tran- 
scends any material form that contains it, 
while at the same time it causes that form 
to exist. While it is certainly true in art 
that a thing exists only by virtue of the 
right mutual relation of its own parts, it is 
also true that its meaning, its life, is found 
only in its relation to some larger whole of 
which it itself forms a part. The eye in a 
52 



portrait, for instance, has individuality by- 
means of the right adjustment of its form, 
color, and setting, but as an eye it has value 
only by virtue of its right relation as part of 
the head ; the head exists by virtue of its 
right relation to the body. The whole figure 
may be but part of a great pictured assem- 
blage in whose importance the final cause 
and justification for every minor detail are 
found. Thus we see that each whole is 
upheld by its meaning, its relation to some 
larger whole which includes it, and which in 
turn is related to a still larger one, and so 
on ad infinitum. We have no right to arrest 
this principle at any point. If we do so in 
painting, and, taking our stand on the doc- 
trine of "art for art's sake," insist that a 
beautiful thing is its own justification quite 
apart from those larger relations which give 
it its moral and spiritual significance, by 
that very insisting we limit the life of our 
beautiful thing, because we cut it off from 
that great scheme of relation which binds 
all things together, each grade depending 
on the next higher one, until we reach the 
greatest Whole of all. 

But we are still such Babel builders, so 
much surer of the solid earth beneath our 
feet than of anything else, so determined 
to scale heaven by piling one stone upon 

53 



another, that we are slow to appreciate that 
the meaning is really the life of all things, 
and must come down to us from above, 
from that which is greater than ourselves. 
It is just here that art, with her insistence 
on the doctrine of relation, may furnish a 
useful element to our thinking, though it 
is unfortunately true that artists are as slow 
as the rest of mankind to see the larger bear- 
ings of their own truth. So profound is the 
doctrine of relation, so self-evident is it in 
art that everything exists only by virtue of 
its relation to something beyond itself, that 
when, carrying this principle farther and 
farther, we postulate a greatest Whole of 
all in which all others are included and in 
which they find their complete meaning, 
we feel instinctively that even that tran- 
scendent whole must have some meaning 
beyond itself, some infinite self-forgetting, 
or it could not continue to live. 

It is often more helpful to us to think 
of wholeness as a living immanent princi- 
ple, than to think of its embodiment in any 
particular whole, even the greatest. It is 
the arresting of this principle at some spe- 
cial point, and assuming that this point is 
the whole to which everything else must 
be related, that brings disastrous results both 
in life and in art. Such arresting is the 

54 



ground of all idolatry, because all wholes 
of which we have any experimental know- 
ledge — rulers, organizations, we ourselves 
— are merely points of expression liable 
to be reconstructed by the very idea that 
has brought them into being, as the painter 
makes a repUca in which he modifies and 
clarifies a favorite thought. It is therefore 
dangerous for us to demand that others 
should sacrifice themselves to us, as if we, 
as mere human beings, had any final right 
to such sacrifice. In a sense we are wholes, 
capable of enforcing obedience; but in 
another sense we are fragments, our per- 
sonality helpless and dependent for exist- 
ence even upon its relation to the greatest 
Whole of all. Our dependence far out- 
balances our power, and this thought should 
make us pitiful and teach us to render 
mercy as we hope to receive it. On the 
other hand, such power and responsibility 
as are rightly ours receive a tremendous 
sanction when we regard ourselves as ap- 
pointed transmitters of the highest law, 
bound to apply and enforce its demands, 
and doing so wisely and safely so long as 
we remember our own dependent position. 
This truth gives us both the justification 
for and the limitations of the " divine right 
of kings." 

SS 



There is another way in which we often 
obstruct the working of the whole ; namely, 
by our lack of faith in its operation within 
ourselves to bring all the elements of our 
own lives into harmonious cooperation. 
Here again we take upon ourselves the re- 
sponsibility that should belong only to the 
law. We propose to ourselves some im- 
aginary whole of sectarian propriety, some 
bloodless ideal from which we omit a large 
part of the real contents of life, and then 
press this atrophied conception down upon 
our living by various forms of asceticism 
in the expectation of a very holy result. 
We might as well try to raise a prize 
apple by cutting off half the roots of the 
apple-tree. Only the whole conceived in 
the fullest possible way can rightly guide 
us both to development and sacrifice. 

The whole in itself stands for devel- 
opment — it is always the ideal towards 
which humanity should strive ; but when 
we consider the life of the whole, the prin- 
ciple of wholeness, the law by which the 
opposing elements that go to make up 
every whole receive their mutual adjust- 
ment, we find this law to be the law of sac- 
rifice ; never sacrifice for its own sake, but 
sacrifice in view of some greater thing to 
be attained. This is the truth most vigor- 

56 



ously brought home to us by the painter's 
experience; and as through sacrifice the 
parts of any whole come into their right 
mutual relation, that relation tends to bind 
them together and reveal them to one an- 
other so that the spirit of sacrifice is trans- 
formed into the spirit of recognition and 
love, the spirit of life itself 

The artist's experience may help us to 
understand this transformation, and to see 
how the power which enforces obedience 
and sacrifice is akin to love. Power as we 
know it in this world usually rouses oppo- 
sition. Even if we consider friction as 
merely a necessity for the application of 
power, there is not only inertia to be over- 
come, but often violent resistance. A man 
compelled to labor may be not only lazy 
but insubordinate. Thus opposition tends 
to drive apart ; but the problem of human- 
ity, as of the artist, is to bring things to- 
gether in a perfect mutual relation. 

To illustrate, let us suppose a perfect ar- 
tist, complete in wisdom and endowment. 
Let us take one of the tints on his palette 
as representing a human life, and see how 
the law of the whole will affect that. We 
will imagine the tint as endowed with a 
certain amount of self-directive energy. It 
finds itself in its place without knowing 

57 



whence it came ; it is to be handled by a 
power which it does not understand, and 
with which it has at first no sympathy. It 
would naturally, guided by its likings and 
dislikings, work itself into some sort of re- 
lation with its immediate neighbors, but ow- 
ing to its limited point of view, this relation 
would not be characterized by any great 
breadth or wisdom. Meanwhile, quietly 
but firmly the artist would be moving 
among all the tints, and placing them as 
he found necessary for the expression of 
his idea. He would love the colors for 
their own beauty, but he would know that 
they could gain a far higher value as ex- 
pressing his thought, and that therefore the 
best thing that could happen to them would 
be to serve his use in whatever way that 
thought demanded. Our tint would thus 
find a mysterious compulsion disposing of 
it beyond, and ofi:en against, its will, and 
would probably rebel, especially when it 
found itself set by the side of a tint from 
quite the other end of the scale. It might 
rebel for a long time, but if at last, whether 
because it could not help itself, or because 
of some unexpectedly discovered inner 
sympathy with the spirit of the artist, it 
should yield itself wholly to his will, it 
would find as his thought came at last to 

58 



complete expression, that by virtue of its 
rightful place in the picture it shared a 
much higher and more enduring life than 
was possible to it in its first estate. Instead 
of being a mere individual tint, it would 
gain a personal quality by its relation to 
all the other tints in the expression of the 
artist's idea, and hence would be in a con- 
dition to understand something of his per- 
sonality, which would be hidden from it 
before. In short, it would have changed 
its basis from the actual to the ideal. It 
would now feel itself strangely upheld by 
the relations into which it had entered in 
obedience to the artist's will ; relations not 
of its own choosing, but which, because of 
their right adjustment to the whole to be 
expressed, would open countless channels 
to the full understanding of that whole and 
participation in its life. The tint entering 
upon these would be conscious of a joyful 
freedom and inflowing life to which it had 
hitherto been an absolute stranger, and at 
the same time its place in the larger whole 
would be assured to it with a stability in- 
conceivable in its former unrelated condi- 
tion. Its entire life would become love, 
or enjoyment of the larger relation. 

Such change as this, such setting over 
of the centre of life from the individual to 

59 



the universal standpoint, is the substance 
of conversion or what is known as a reli- 
gious experience, under whatever outward 
circumstances it may occur. It is the uni- 
versal testimony that this opens a new 
world of love and joy. A human life, led 
by outward events and inward processes 
as various as the infinity of souls born into 
this world, passing perhaps through bitter 
pain and struggle, comes at last to accept 
the law of the whole as the only possible 
law of its being, and finds at once number- 
less channels of sympathy opening in every 
direction through which its life flows forth 
to meet other life in that happy interchange 
that we know as love. 



60 



III. INDIVIDUALITY 



^'J'estime qu'en fait d'art il n'y a pas de redites 
a craindre. Tout est vieux et tout est nouveau ; les 
choses changent avec le point de vue ; il n'y a de 
definitif et d'absolu que les lois du beau : il trans- 
forme tout ce qu'il touche, il ajoute aux choses plus 
encore qu'il ne leur enleve ; il renouvellerait, plutot 
que de I'epuiser, la source intarissable des idees. Le 
jour ou parait une oeuvre d'art, fut-elle accomplie, 
chacun peut dire, avec P ambition de poursuivre la 
sienne et de ne repeter personne, que cette ceuvre est 
a refaire, ce qui est tres-encourageant pour P esprit 
humain." — Eugene Fromentin, Une Annee dans le 
Sahely p. 33. 

** E, se il mondo giu ponesse mente 
Al fondamento che natura pone, 
Seguendo lui avria buona la gente. 
Ma voi torcete alia religione 
Tal che fu nato a cingersi la spada 
E fate re di tal ch' e da sermone 
Onde la traccia vostra e fuor di strada.'* 
Dante, Purgatorio, Canto VIII. line 142. 




III. INDIVIDUALITY 

proceeding to regions of life 
in which we ourselves are the 
parts, we can of course have 
no such survey of the content 
of the whole as is possible in 
looking at the work of an artist. All we 
can do is to carry the principles learned by 
the artist as essential to his achievement 
into higher realms, and see what would 
result from their operation on the largest 
conceivable scale. The principle of whole- 
ness leads us inevitably to a higher and 
higher application of itself When we dis- 
cover that in a picture at least everything 
exists and has meaning by virtue of its re- 
lation to something beyond itself, — and 
further that every work of art has a wor- 
thy existence only when rightly related 
to truths of external nature or of human 
feeling as perceived by man, — when we 
discover these things, we see that the tran- 
sitive nature of the principle we have re- 
cognized will give us no rest, until with 
ardor yet with reverence we have traced its 
working up to the very throne of God, and 
found in that Supreme Unity the consum- 
mate and perfect relation from which all 
lesser units are evolved. 



The artist has certain advantages for this 
task. He needs no elaborate philosophy 
to prove to him that opposites can be re- 
solved in a higher unity, because he always 
begins with the unity itself, — that is, with 
a thought, a conception, a whole seeking 
expression, — and he finds in the oppositions 
and contrasts by which he is surrounded 
the means of that expression made ready 
to his hand. The sharper the contrast, the 
more completely he can set forth his idea ; 
because the longer the scale between the 
extremes of dark and light, the more inter- 
mediate shades there are, and hence the 
more power he has to enrich his picture by 
complexity of detail. He therefore in his 
work rejoices in, and profits by, those very 
conditions which in human life we rebel 
against. We find ourselves in the midst 
of oppositions. We are deeply identified 
with one side or another in controversy. 
We feel that we could not maintain any 
semblance of self-respect were we to aban- 
don the truth for which we stand ; and in 
this we are doubtless right, for the artist 
could never paint his picture unless each 
of his colors had a definite place in the 
scale. Yet if our truth and the truth of 
our opponent are both contained in the 
greater unity, there must be some discover- 

64 



able relation between them, and this rela- 
tion, if we can only find it, may be the 
meaning for the sake of which both his 
truth and our truth exist. 

Let us now pass to a consideration, from 
the point of view of art, of the truth of in- 
dividuality, which we may hold to mean 
the definite and (if we had a survey of 
the whole) ascertainable place occupied by 
each creature in the infinite scale of being. 

All colors can, in theory at least, be re- 
duced to a scale, but when we get beyond 
the simple prismatic tints, the scale be- 
comes an enormously complex one. Blue, 
for example, scales all the way fi"om purple 
to green. An admixture of red turns it 
towards purple, and an admixture of yel- 
low turns it towards green ; so blues range 
all the way from ultramarine to turquoise. 
These two phases of blue blend into each 
other so imperceptibly that it is hard to 
say where pure unadulterated blue can be 
found. It seems as if, when the purple ele- 
ment had been withdrawn fi-om one side 
and the green fi-om the other, there would 
be nothing left between. A similar thing 
is true of all the other colors. 

In addition to the gradation of which 
we have been speaking, each shade is modi- 
fied by its degree of purity and luminosity, 

65 



so that we have to imagine other scales run- 
ning across the original one ; and when we 
come to the innumerable shades of brown 
and gray, themselves compound tints mod- 
ified endlessly by other compound tints, 
the whole scale becomes so complex that it 
is impossible to think it out, though that is 
no reason for doubting its orderly existence. 
It is sufficient to say that from the point of 
view of the whole — all the tints at once — 
such a scale must exist, and in it must be 
found the exact place to which each tint has 
an inalienable right by virtue of its relation 
to the tints on either side of it, and through 
them to all the rest. Thus relation is the 
ground of every tint's existence. It occu- 
pies a place of which it may be said that 
it is more than this, and less than that, and 
therefore not identical with either. It is 
thus isolated, separated out, which is the 
meaning of the word individual. 

Now we have no more knowledge of the 
original constituents of being than we have 
of the composition of a ray of light. We 
can analyze a character, as we can unfold a 
ray in the spectroscope, but what it is made 
of and why it all goes together as it does is 
a mystery to us. We may reduce every- 
thing to vibrations, but the law of their 
combination to produce the various effects 
66 



that we see is beyond our ken. Art and 
music, with their laws of harmony derived 
from man's experience that certain combi- 
nations are pleasing and coherent, while 
others are the reverse, furnish us perhaps the 
best analogies and suggestions for under- 
standing this difficult subject, and science 
might do worse than to take account of the 
mstmctive perceptions oi the artist as indi- 
cating the direction at least in which to look 
for the explanation of certain phenomena. 
If our analogy from colors be worth any- 
thing, we may believe, in general, that a 
human individuality is the adjustment of 
certain fundamental elements in a fashion 
differing more or less from any adjustment 
that has ever been made of them before. 
The character that is immediately under 
our eye may, like some compound tint, be 
far removed in appearance from the primi- 
tive elements, but as, like the tint, it must 
be made from modifications of them, they 
reach up to it through these modifications 
and thus really lie at its foundation. It is 
therefore safe to speak of the fundamental 
elements, and only by means of them can 
one get any clear definitions. The fact 
that a certain green is yellower than one 
green and bluer than another discriminates 
it for the time being, but does not give it 

67 



any fixed status unless we take all imagin- 
able shades of green into account, and see 
also how green is related to all the other 
expressive phases of the ray of light. Yet 
as this is ideally possible, we can see that, 
when we assume the whole, relativity be- 
comes for us an assurance of reality, and 
discriminations are seen to be so deeply 
founded that they will stand fast. 

But this is only a negative ground for 
existence. Because a thing is not some- 
thing else, does it follow that it is anything 
in itself? Certainly not unless we assume 
always an opposing pair of elements which 
hold the thing we are considering as be- 
tween a thumb and forefinger and prevent 
its disappearing in either direction. For- 
tunately these are not far to seek. The 
world is full of them, and they have always 
given philosophers a great deal of trouble. 
If when a statement is made an opposite 
statement is always possible, if the perpen- 
dicular involves the horizontal, if light in- 
volves dark, etc., then between any of these 
pairs there are always many possibilities of 
adjustment of opposing tendencies, and 
therefore many possible realities. We are 
thus led to believe that a certain relation 
between opposing elements may actually 
cause an individuality to exist, or rather 
68 



that it may be the means of its existence, 
the final cause lying back in the whole 
that prescribes the relation. It is clear 
that our recognition of individuality de- 
pends largely on relation. We decipher 
an illegible word full as much by the con- 
text as by spelling out its component let- 
ters, and there are not many stars that even 
the wisest astronomer could name if they 
were alone in the field of his telescope, and 
he had no idea of their height from the 
horizon or of their celestial neighbors. If 
we are blind to the fact that relation also 
constitutes individuality, it is because the 
component elements of a character, a star, 
or of anything that exists, being held to- 
gether by relation, form a whole, and that 
whole is always what impresses us. In 
picture making certainly, we have found 
that nothing can be made to exist except 
by virtue of the right mutual relation of 
its parts. Now if the elements which, in 
innumerable adjustments, and under an 
infinitude of modifications from various 
causes, make up every human individual- 
ity, are fundamental ones, reaching through 
no matter how many intermediaries to the 
extremes of the scale, then definition and 
reality are assured to every individual by 
his relation to everything else, and through 

69 



everything else to the whole. His exist- 
ence is therefore a fact, though dependent 
on relation. 

This dependence we do not realize un- 
til we get some glimpse of the whole. 
We are inclined rather to hug the fact for 
its own sake, and have therefore an over- 
weening confidence in the importance of 
our human individuality as such, and feel 
that we must maintain and barricade it by 
resisting all pressure from without, whereas 
if we understood that our individuality is 
really established and maintained by forces 
outside of us, we should trust these forces 
more and feel less heavy and narrow re- 
sponsibility for the conservation of that 
which is really not in our own keeping at 
all. A deeper view of the ideal ground- 
ing of our individuality would give us a 
greater reverence for it, and at the same 
time would increase our freedom in its use 
and development. We should see that 
no training can destroy it, no calamity cut 
it off, no physical death wipe it out. We 
should appreciate that because each of us 
expresses a unique relation of elements, so 
each of us has unique possibilities, rights, 
and duties that no man can take from us. 
Herein lies the supreme native dignity of 
every human soul. 

70 



We may now inquire what the most 
fundamental elements are that go to make 
up a human individuality. 

One of the best ways of finding out 
what man is in himself is to study the 
things he makes for his own use, especially 
if he makes them unconsciously and in- 
stinctively. We may be able to read him 
through them. Probably nothing stands 
closer to man than the structures he builds, 
for though these are made less instinctively 
than the shell of the fish, the nest of the 
bird, and the dam of the beaver, yet in 
them, broadly speaking, man expresses 
himself, and they are therefore made in 
his likeness. Hence we may gain some 
deeper knowledge of man if we study his 
buildings and find out of what contrasting 
elements they are composed. We could 
of course read a man from all his acts and 
his dealings with other persons, but as 
other persons react on and modify him in 
a way that inanimate things do not except 
to a very limited extent, we can understand 
his naked individuality best by studying 
his dealing with inanimate things. 

In looking at buildings we shall be 
likely to note first the superficial elements, 
and take account of the materials em- 
ployed. We may say in looking at a 

71 



structure that the character of its exterior 
depends on the proportions in which the 
wood and stone, or the wood and brick 
that compose it are combined. Or we may- 
see in it chiefly the proportionate relation 
of wall space and openings, which propor- 
tion sums up much of the difference be- 
tween a factory and a fortress, in the first 
of which the chief requirement is window 
space for light, while the latter needs chiefly 
wall space for defence. We may note any 
one of the many adjustments of rough and 
smooth surfaces, of planes and curves, of 
perpendicular and horizontal lines, of any 
of the pairs, in short, that go to make up 
the building, and say that in these ele- 
ments and in their adjustment lies its spe- 
cial character ; but if we look deeply we 
shall find that these things are all more or 
less incidental, and that the real individu- 
ality of the building depends on its mean- 
ing, on the intent for which it was designed. 
Moreover, we shall find that this intent, 
however disguised in dwellings factory, or 
institution, by temporary causes, is always 
some adjustment of those abstract elements 
which we call the individual and the uni- 
versal ; that it is some expression of the 
relation of man to his environment. This 
simple but most fundamental relation is 
72 



in fact the essence of all building ; man's 
need to go in under shelter both from 
weather and from enemies, demanding the 
roof and the walls, while his need to go 
out and to see out, demands the door and 
the windows. 

A hotel is more universal than individ- 
ual because so many persons lodge there 
without impressing themselves upon it, 
yet it has a certain grace imparted to it by 
the effort to please its guests ; a recognition 
of the individual element which saves it 
from the bare universality of a factory, 
where everything expresses use, the indi- 
vidual being present there merely for the 
ends he can serve. A private house tells 
the story of its owner's character ; whether 
narrowly individual and shut in to him- 
self, or full of that spirit of hospitality and 
recognition of his environment that de- 
mands wide doorways, sunshine, and gen- 
erous provisions for comfort. In mere 
external form also, the individual and uni- 
versal elements in varying combination 
give us all the different styles of architec- 
ture ; the Greek, with its harmonious and 
balanced proportion, being more universal 
than the Gothic, with its aspiring lines, ir- 
regular forms, and individual caprices of 
ornament 

73 



Of course this is a most general state- 
ment. Temporary necessity and a thou- 
sand other causes may qualify it and pro- 
duce marked exceptions to the rule, yet 
in general it is true that we can grade and 
classify a structure most permanently when, 
making due allowance for the style of archi- 
tecture and the social conditions existing 
at the time of its erection, we look below 
the surface enough to see in it an adjust- 
ment of the most fundamental elements 
that we have any knowledge of — namely, 
the individual and the universal. 

Now if this be true of a building, one 
of the forms in which man most clearly 
expresses his own meaning, may it not 
also be true of man himself? May we 
not see in every individual, under all the 
modifications of race, parentage, and tem- 
perament, some basic adjustment of those 
fundamental elements which are the very 
conditions of our thinking ; those elements 
that we call the individual and the univer- 
sal, the part and the whole, standing in an 
omnipresent relation to each other ? 

The words individual and universal are 
of course very abstract ; and necessarily so, 
because we are trying to express that oppo- 
sition and relation that appear in some form 
wherever we look, by terms that are not lim- 

74 



ited to any special conditions, as would be 
the case if we spoke of man and nature, of 
masculine and feminine, of love and truth, 
or of any of the innumerable pairs of ele- 
ments that we see in the world about us. 
We are trying to find that which underlies 
and includes all these other pairs ; that which 
is their essence, and by analogy to which all 
the others can be explained. We can find 
these fundamental elements in everything. 
Nothing exists that does not partake of them 
both, though one usually preponderates over 
the other. We see them both in large and 
in small ; in the macrocosm and the micro- 
cosm ; the universal supplying the element 
of breadth and repose, the individual that of 
initiative and movement. When we seek 
to be more specific we can identify the in- 
dividualwith the centrifugal force, the uni- 
versal with the centripetal : the individual 
with the perpendicular line, the universal 
with the horizontal : the individual with the 
masculine temperament, the universal with 
the feminine. 

When we come to higher regions and try 
to identify the individual with love, because 
love suggests out-going motion; and the 
universal with truth, because truth suggests 
repose and balance, we touch that inter- 
changeableness of the two elements which 

75 



hints that each of them is but the other 
seen from a different point of view. We 
say that the individual corresponds with 
the masculine and we also identify it with 
love, yet love seems to be a more feminine 
quality than truth. The fact is that when 
we consider these most subtle and spiritual 
phases of the omnipresent duality, the two 
elements are so interwoven as to be almost 
indistinguishable. Both are individual, 
both are universal. 

But, broadly speaking, we can divide the 
persons we know into two classes, one of 
which gets hold of Hfe chiefly through its 
instincts, the receptive feminine type ; the 
other by its reasoning faculties, the mascu- 
line aggressive type; and this quite irre- 
spective of their being men or women. In 
every department of life, too, we can make 
this distinction, though the sub-departments 
often contradict the main inclination of the 
character. Sculpture is more masculine 
than painting, yet a sculptor may have a 
feminine touch, while a woman painter may 
handle her subjects in sculpturesque fashion. 

Of course such discriminations as we are 
speaking of cannot be stated with scientific 
precision. They could doubtless be so 
stated if we had the complete scale of be- 
ing in all its complexity within our grasp. 

76 



But this is now and must always be be- 
yond the capacity of the human mind. 
When we would define and classify an in- 
dividuality, we must compare it with others 
not too widely separated from it, thus form- 
ing a class or limit within which we can 
observe the interworking of those elements 
which are the same, alike in their largest 
and their smallest manifestations. Related 
values are always our guide. It is no dic- 
tionary method. For example — all edu- 
cated persons can write something. Those 
who write more and better than the rest 
form the class that we call authors. Be- 
tween any two authors discriminations can 
again be made, and these will correspond to 
the distinction of the whole and the part. 
It is told of Dumas and Victor Hugo that 
when they had new plays that they wished 
to introduce to a manager, they went about 
it in exactly opposite fashions, Dumas 
launching his production as a whole, all 
at once, from the outside, while Hugo pro- 
ceeded more cautiously, putting a shrewd 
suggestion in the mind of the manager and 
letting it develop from within. 

It would be hard to trace the complex 
interweavings of the two elements through 
all their manifestations, even were they not 
further complicated by external influences 

77 



and disguised by incomplete development. 
In trying to accomplish the impossible feat 
of deciphering them from the outside, one 
might distribute " questionnaires," and set- 
ting a whole community to record experi- 
ences, tabulate them to the end of time 
without coming to any clear result, just as 
in picture-making one may compare colors 
point by point, and trace every eyelash and 
wrinkle, without ever making a living por- 
trait ; the trouble in both cases being that 
we begin with the details instead of the 
whole, with the outward and often acci- 
dental manifestation, rather than with the 
inward verity. 

The artist finds an immense relief from 
the complicated and fruitless strain of fol- 
lowing out details, and regains that clear 
vision from which alone he can work, when 
he draws back from his subject and sees 
the whole summed up in a few broad 
simple masses. So, in looking at any sub- 
ject, the larger and more simple our per- 
ception of it, the more truly we have it at 
our command. This method is doubtless 
opposed to the spirit of to-day, but for that 
very reason it is greatly needed, and for that 
very reason the artist's experience may help 
us, because he is obliged to look at things 
as wholes. Surface details may blind our 

78 



eyes to the larger aspect, or even contra- 
dict it, yet because the larger is more deeply 
true than they, it is permanent while they 
are ephemeral. 

We get a broad, simple grasp of life 
when we see in it an ever-varying yet pro- 
gressive adjustment of man, the individual, 
to his environment, the universal. We get 
an equally broad and simple view of man- 
kind when we see both in individuals and 
in groups of individuals — such as cities, 
nations, etc., which also have their individ- 
ual character — some special adjustment of 
those fundamental elements that we call the 
individual and the universal, simply because 
these words, better than any others, express 
that omnipresent opposition and relation 
within the Whole whereby it seems to weave 
all things out of itself 

It must be understood that all we have 
here been saying regards only that fixed 
natural quality that belongs to us each as 
an individual, that which we are born with, 
which is ours without the asking. What 
we can do with this quality, how we can 
use it to enter into relations and thereby 
develop character, will be the subject of 
the next chapter. 



79 



IV. PERSONALITY 



*' Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier 
by and by. 
Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within 
the human eye. 

*« Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro' 
the human soul ; 
Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, 
in the whole." 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Tears 
After. 

**C'6tait I'expression d'un moiy qui ne pouvant 
dechoir, et n' ay ant pas a s'elever, conserve une egale 
humeur avec tous." — Figaro ^ — said of the Prince de 
Sagan. 




IV. PERSONALITY 

JLL that has hitherto been said 
concerns the mere fact of ex- 
istence, the wholeness that be- 
longs to each of us by right 
of birth, our individual stand- 
point in the scheme of creation. 

Our personality is a much higher thing 
than this. It is a larger wholeness made 
possible for us by our connection with all 
other life, and developed through recog- 
nition by us of our relations to other be- 
ings and to the external world. An able 
thinker has well said that " the personal is 
the individual in its relations with the uni- 
versal." We have a certain awe of the 
word person as something higher and less 
easily apprehended than individual. The 
word individual means isolated, separated 
out. The word person (from persona^ a 
mask, symbol of a character) while pre- 
serving the idea of individual separateness, 
hints at recombination and far-reaching re- 
lations, because character is formed only by 
contact with others. " Es bildet ein Tal- 
ent sich in der Stille; sich ein charakter 
in dem Strom der Welt." The personal 
always means the responsive, the recogniz- 
ing. 

83 



Practically speaking, what do we mean 
by personality '^ What is a person as we 
know him ? As he passes us in the street 
undistinguished from the throng he is 
merely an individual, but if he be a man 
renowned for brave deeds he becomes a 
person to us even before we have met him. 
His relation to life, expressed by those 
deeds, has made him more than an indi- 
vidual in our thought. When we know 
him personally, as we say, and he enters 
into an actual relation with us of acquaint- 
ance or of friendship, we no longer think 
of him as merely an individual. He is a 
person. Yet what makes him a person ? 
Not his face alone, or his hands, or his 
bodily presence, for the first might be 
marred, the second cut off, and the third 
removed to a distance, yet our conception 
of him and his method of dealing with 
life, his way, would still remain. Do we 
not love to speak for our dead or absent 
friends, and tell what they would have said 
if present, so sure do we feel how their 
personality would act in any given set of 
circumstances ? We have a sense of their 
quality that is quite independent of its 
physical embodiment, dear as that may 
be. When we think of their personality 
we think of them as acting, speaking, lov- 

84 



ing, using the body as an instrument ; so it 
seems that it is always the individual in re- 
lation to other individuals that constitutes 
the person. 

To recapitulate, we may say that the in- 
dividual is such by virtue of a certain 
coherent relation of the two elements that 
we call the individual and the universal; 
and that he becomes a person and reacts 
towards the universal by entering into rela- 
tions with the external world through his 
senses, and into relations with other human 
life through his affections and his will. All 
these things produce their impression on 
him, and he in turn influences them, his 
natural quality taking on different hues ac- 
cording to the differing characters of the 
wholes to which he finds himself related, in 
such capacities, perhaps, as father of a fam- 
ily, member of a business firm, and of a mu- 
sical club. He may appear like a different 
person in each of these different capacities, 
yet he is always capable of falUng back on 
his native and indestructible individuality 
which does not change, however much cir- 
cumstances may modify its expression. 

Here again we have a beautiful analogy 
from colors. The graded color-scale of 
which we have spoken, and in which all 
the tints fall into line like the soldiers in 

85 



an army, has no expressive life — it simply 
exists. It is only when some selected tints 
are brought together to express an idea 
that they become transparent with mean- 
ing. Their aspect is greatly modified by 
the juxtaposition in which they find them- 
selves in any given whole or picture. A 
greenish blue may be made to look almost 
purple by putting a bright yellow beside 
it, and may also be fairly turned to green 
by the near presence of a shade of violet, 
yet it will be the same color through all 
its apparent modifications. The point to 
be noted is that by lending itself to various 
combinations every tint acquires an ex- 
pressive value, and therefore, if it were sen- 
tient, would enjoy a delightful feeling of 
variety and movement diat could never 
belong to it while it remained fixed in its 
narrow individuality. 

Applying this truth to the human indi- 
vidual, one wonders why men and women 
are so afraid of entering into the fullest 
possible relations with life, of opening their 
minds to every sort of truth, of spending 
and being spent for the sake of others, of 
cultivating sympathetic relations with all 
classes of society. The cause of our dis- 
trust in these directions is partly at least to 
be found in our uncertainty of ourselves, 
86 



due to our imperfect appreciation of the 
deep grounding of our individuality. We 
are afraid to compromise ourselves, and do 
not understand that the only thing in us 
which has any real value is eternal, and 
can by no means be taken from us : that 
it is, on the contrary, developed, illumi- 
nated, and made glorious by the widest 
possible acknowledgment of relations on 
every side. 

Of course both right relations and wrong 
relations are possible to man. Right rela- 
tions are those which help to carry into com- 
plete expression that thought or phase of 
the whole which lies at the base of each 
individuality. Wrong relations are those 
which, because they do not take this largest 
Whole of all and its intention into ac- 
count, are partial and one-sided. The 
largest Whole of all, like a consummate 
artist, works always to clarify all forms of 
its expression ; so a constraint is constantly 
brought to bear upon man in this direction, 
which conflicts with and overrules many 
relations into which he has blindly entered 
on his own account. This is the mill in 
which our lives are ground. It is here that 
we are met by the constant demand for 
sacrifice. The individual is called to sut 
fer in the interests of some larger whole, 

87 



perhaps unperceived by him, of which he 
ideally forms a part. This experience is 
familiar to every one of us. That which 
is not so plainly seen is the very comfort- 
ing truth which we discern in art, namely, 
that such sacrifice is in its essence construc- 
tive; and that the individual, seemingly shat- 
tered by means of his relation to some larger 
whole, really loses by such shattering only 
the outer husk which held him limited and 
apart in his individuality, so that the real 
eternal person is revealed in every human 
being as he comes, after struggle and pain, 
into a true relation with his fellows in the 
largest Whole of all. 

Personality must always be acquired 
upon the basis of individuality : a man 
must be true to himself through all the re- 
lations into which he enters, or they, and 
consequently his personality, will be false 
and unreal. It is the knowing what not 
to do, the renouncing of all that does not 
harmonize with the inner truth, that im- 
parts the fine flavor called personal distinc- 
tion or style to whatever a man does. Style 
is the individual element royally holding 
the universal at the bar of its own private 
judgment; the man as he is, and as no one 
else can ever be. This quality of individ- 
ual truth and rectitude may of course be 
88 



carried too far. It may end in niggardly 
self-hoarding and distrust of all external 
influences, and this is fully as bad as the 
opposite extreme of yielding oneself to 
every transient appeal, and so getting en- 
tangled in many a compromising relation. 
We endeavored to show in an earlier 
chapter that there is a close connection be- 
tween personality and wholeness ; that since 
all wholes of man's making are expressions 
of his personality, of his sense of relation to 
life, therefore, all natural objects are con- 
ceivably personal expressions, forms under 
which the infinite Whole manifests itself and 
through which it seeks recognition. Man in 
his mere individual existence is the highest 
of these personal expressions of the Whole, 
but he has no personality of his own ex- 
cept as he develops it by entering into re- 
lations with men and things. Personality 
in the highest sense always implies some 
action of the will, some voluntary relation 
with the universal, so we cannot ascribe 
complete personality to any but a living, 
self-conscious creature; yet a touch of it 
may belong to a house, a dog, a favorite 
chair or pen, to anything that closely 
touches human life, that renders sympathy 
or service, and that is recognized as so do- 
ing. Recognition seems to have a great 

89 



deal to do with the matter. It is relation 
become conscious of itself. 

Where there is no consciousness of re- 
lation, we should not of course say that 
a whole has personal quality in the ordi- 
nary sense of the word personal, yet our 
definition of the personal as the individual 
in its relation to the universal would apply 
to even such things as a seed or a micro- 
scopic atom, to anything, in fact, that is 
both separated out and related. We may 
therefore say that the same personal or life 
principle runs from the top to the bot- 
tom of the scale, though only those forms 
which are the higher manifestations of 
it, such as man for example, can enter 
into its spirit sufficiently to help it out 
by voluntary recognition of their environ- 
ment. 

As in ordinary speech we make a clear 
distinction between man and nature, and 
never use the word person of any creature 
less than man, we find a great advantage to 
our thinking in the use of the terms whole 
and wholeness, because they stand for that 
quality of rightly adjusted and therefore 
expressive relation which may be predi- 
cated with equal truth of a grain of sand 
or an archangel. They may therefore be 
used all along the line without admitting 
90 



any marked line of separation between mat- 
ter and spirit. 

As we study men, the highest wholes of 
which we have experimental knowledge, 
we find them to have personality by virtue 
of their relations to other forms of life. 
We may believe then, that the higher the 
grade of any whole is the more it may 
have of personal quality, because the more 
capable it is of entering into relations in 
which it both gives and receives recogni- 
tion. Inanimate objects receive recognition, 
but do not give it. Complete recognition 
on both sides would mean a complete per- 
sonal relation, vital at every point. We 
can conceive all the individual elements in 
the greatest Whole of all as coming into 
a perfect relation with each other, and 
through each other with the Whole itself^ 
and thus our very highest conception be- 
comes a personal one. The greatest Whole 
of all must be only waiting for recognition 
to become alive in every part. Person- 
ality is in our careless thinking so often 
confounded with individuality that it is 
held to be something isolated, and limited. 
As a matter of fact it has no limits, be- 
cause every individual stands in some dis- 
coverable (if opportunity were given) rela- 
tion to everything else in the universe, and 

91 



the greatest Whole of all is such because 
it includes and is the cause of all other re- 
lations, being itself the perfect blending of 
the individual and the universal. 

But enough of theory. We want, if we 
can find it, some practical testimony that 
the personal aspect of the whole is the 
truest one : some proof that the larger and 
more inclusive the whole the more per- 
sonal its quality becomes. We need such 
testimony because the large is for us too 
often the vague and the indefinite. Just 
here we may seek help in a new quarter, 
and ask what the mother, as the ruler of a 
household, the home-maker, has to tell us. 
The fatherhood of God has been preached 
endlessly, the mother side has been neg- 
lected ; yet this feminine phase of the whole 
may supply some forgotten elements, be- 
cause a real mother is the informing genius 
of the most perfect whole that exists on 
earth, one in which many lesser wholes, 
such as children, servants, and household 
goods find their rightful places as minis- 
tering to the general happiness and welfare, 
while the happiness and welfare of these 
is the end for which the home as a whole 
exists. 

Of course the father and mother together 
make the home, but the father stands facing 
92 



outwards towards the world, while the 
mother's chief concern is, or ought to be, 
with the home itself. She correlates the 
needs and capacities of all the members of 
her family, herself often unconscious of 
the process. Their various interests are 
summed up and adjusted in her person- 
ality, which, absorbed by the interests of 
the whole, loses all thought of self She 
is the whole, the right relation of all the 
others. She works for order, and why? 
Because only when things are in their right- 
ful places are they ready for instant per- 
sonal service. The husband, whose nature 
and whose training lead him to relate things 
more to some special end, comes in to put 
up a shelf perhaps. He leaves his tools 
about, and the room in disorder. The 
wife, because the personal sense of the 
whole is stronger in her, patiently picks 
up screws and gimlet and puts them where 
they will be ready for the next call. She 
works for unity, not because she theorizes 
about it, but because her loving personality 
is the unit which constrains each self-willed 
child to such sacrifices as shall make him 
a helpful, and consequently happy member 
of the family. It is her personal concep- 
tion, her love of all her family at once, 
that guides her activity and makes each 

93 



duty plain. And when she tries to rule 
her servants wisely, how clear it becomes 
to her that they suffer and make every one 
else suffer when, from lack of that sense of 
the whole which is implied in personal al- 
legiance to her and regard for her interests, 
they refuse to do some unusual bit of work 
because it is not in their special depart- 
ment, or withhold some important bit of 
information because they think it is not 
their place to give it. In the writer's own 
experience a trusted upstairs maid allowed 
the kitchen table-cloths to be gnawed by 
mice for three successive summers while the 
house was shut up, cooks having changed 
in the interval, because she did not consider 
it her business to speak of what was in the 
cook's department ! 

The sense of the whole, the sense of re- 
lation to personal need and use, alone makes 
life clear and reasonable, because it alone 
fuses scattered duties into an allegiance to 
a larger will. The good mistress of a 
household, just because its wholeness and 
her personality are one, has a very keen 
sense of the needs, the duties, and the feel- 
ings of all its members or parts. She can, 
and will if necessary, become for a time 
one of those parts, taking up any work 
that for some reason of health or pleasure 

94 



another may lay aside, but her true place 
is that of the whole, blessedly alive with 
sympathy and inspiration for all, and per- 
petually giving her house itself and all 
that it contains as a living contribution to 
society. 

We see in all this that the factor needed 
to make clear to our thinking the per- 
sonal quality of wholeness is the feminine, 
the love element. The glorious mission 
of truth is to push ever onward to further 
heights and use that which has already 
been attained only as a stepping-stone to 
something greater. But this of itself is not 
enough to make a whole ; we must have 
also the spirit of love, the spirit that turns 
back, that includes, that never loses sight 
of the needs of the little ones, that brings 
kings to worship at the cradle of a new- 
born babe. Only when we combine these 
two functions of the Highest, and they are 
one at their source, do we get a notion of 
what wholeness really is, and see that in 
its loftiest manifestations it is most vital 
and personal. 

There are other lines of argument that 
tend to show the personal character of 
wholeness. We realize when we visit the 
house where some great man has lived 
that it is the personal which unifies and 

95 



gives meaning to any collection of objects, 
and this although centuries may stand 
between us and the man himself. It is 
almost like meeting Albert Diirer to go 
through his old house at Nuremberg. 
World's Fairs weary us because of their 
lack of personal coordination and expres- 
sion. The innumerable objects that they 
contain do not combine to form a whole 
in any vital and expressive sense; they 
have never been sanctified and spiritual- 
ized by the actual experience of service ; 
they are as ghastly as an unsmoked fire- 
place. There is a certain justification for 
large accumulations of property in the fact 
that it is by personality that wealth is lifted 
from the sordid level where it ends in itself, 
and is transmuted into an expression of its 
owner's mind and heart. The expression 
may be faulty and selfish, yet just because 
it has the unity of a personality behind it, 
it has a fascination that is lacking to great 
impersonal enterprises, even if these be 
undertaken for the public good. 

In our human thinking we have hitherto 
failed to get the inspiring suggestions that 
may be drawn fi:'om the identification of 
wholeness with personality, because we 
have limited our idea of a person to man 
himself We thus lose the sense of kin- 



ship that we might have with all the orders 
below us, such as animals, plants, and even 
rocks and the brown earth. The artist in- 
stinctively feels that these are a part of his 
life, and are moved by the same power that 
moves him. It is pleasant to note that a 
sense of man's relationship with nature is 
now rapidly on the increase. This devel- 
opment is often branded as pantheistic and 
dangerous by those who have man's spirit- 
ual concerns deeply at heart, but the truth 
is that it threatens no manner of danger, 
but on the contrary promises great joy and 
enlargement provided we balance it by 
extending the identification of wholeness 
with personality in the opposite direction 
as well, and realize that the higher we rise 
above man in the scale, the more complete 
and absolute personality we shall surely 
find, since the tendency of wholeness to 
declare itself openly as personality progres- 
sively increases from the monad up to 
man. 

We sometimes attach a bad meaning to 
the word personal just because we limit 
our conception of personality to man. 
We consider "personalities" objection- 
able; a personal God means to us a re- 
stricted one. We fancy that we transcend 
our own personality when we do any great 

97 



world-embracing deed, and the Buddhist 
tells us of a Nirvana in which the personal 
self shall disappear. All this tends to 
vagueness of thought about the future, and 
vagueness of relation to the Highest. 
What we need is to realize that our indi- 
viduality is indestructible ('unless we our- 
selves voluntarily destroy it) and that our 
personality lies in the right relating of this 
individuality to everything else in the uni- 
verse; so that our personality is never a 
thing to be abandoned and cast aside, but 
rather to be progressively entered into and 
enjoyed. That which we must outgrow 
and cast aside is our own limiting concep- 
tion of, and consciousness of, self. This 
we stupidly and mistakenly call our per- 
sonality, and we pride ourselves on it, 
thinking primarily of everything in the 
universe as related to us and to our own 
desires, until taught by suffering we learn 
to relate ourselves and everything else to 
the greatest Whole of all. 

Thus personality may be a very great 
or a very small conception, according as 
we view it. The impersonal, which word 
we often use to express our sense of that 
which transcends the personal, is really the 
more deeply and nobly personal because 
it is that which belongs to the World-per- 

98 



sonality of which each of us is a fragment. 
For example, all the works of an artist are 
expressions of his personality, of his sense 
of relation to life ; because, however much 
he may scorn the idea of working for the 
approbation and applause of his contem- 
poraries, it is certain that he could never 
be at the pains to externalize his ideas at 
all if he had not some expectation that his 
thought would be recognized sooner or 
later. In proportion as he is a great man, 
however, the appeal for recognition that he 
makes through his work will be a general 
and impersonal one. That is to say, his 
own personality though embodied in the 
work will claim nothing for itself, and the 
appeal it makes will not be to any human 
individual or class as such. In liiis sense 
it will be impersonal, yet it will be deeply 
personal in the sense that it seeks the ap- 
probation of the Whole and will have no 
lesser judge. Works animated by this 
spirit carry their own atmosphere of purity 
and elevation with them, whereas it would 
be fatal to the modesty of any statue, nude 
or draped, if it should seem to ogle and 
demand a recognition terminating in itself, 
instead of one that passes through and be- 
yond it to the Spirit of Beauty that ani- 
mates all noble art, and which, we cannot 

99 



say it too often, is in the deepest sense a 
personal spirit. 

To sum up the thoughts of this chapter 
and the foregoing, we may say that individ- 
uality is the truth of existence or fact, and 
that personahty is the truth of relation; 
recognition of relation being the process 
whereby the lower wholeness or individ- 
uality is developed into the higher whole- 
ness or personality. 

We all have within us a strong sense 
of both the lower and the higher whole- 
ness. The first is allied to our ideas of 
truth, the last to our ideas of love. Our 
instinctive likings and dislikings in mat- 
ters of taste bear witness to this. Why is 
it that elaborate cast-iron work is so often 
offensive ? Why is it that intentionally 
streaked and mottled surfaces such as are 
to be seen in modern hardware are so odi- 
ous f Why is a cooking-stove resplendent 
with nickel-plating and reeking with orna- 
ment so hideous ? Why is scented muci- 
lage an abomination? Simply because 
all these insult the deep truth of individu- 
ality. In the first two the ornament is got 
too cheaply. It is not structural. It of- 
fends our instinctive sense that elaboration 
belongs only to that which is highly organ- 
ized. It is therefore not genuine. The 

lOO 



cooking-stove which tries to masquerade 
as a parlor pet loses the quiet dignity that 
belongs to it as an indispensable house- 
hold adjunct, while it wholly fails of its 
ambition to please by an elaborate exterior 
which has no more relation to its real na- 
ture than the fragrance of checkerberry has 
to the composition of mucilage. It is try- 
ing to enter into relations for which it is 
naturally unfit. Then again, why does a 
person of taste always prefer hangings 
made of some beautiful stuff that comes by 
the yard to those curtains that are woven 
on purpose with elaborate borders defining 
their shape ? Why are the paper napkins 
with colored borders that the Japanese 
send over to us now, so much less attrac- 
tive than those they used to make with an 
all over pattern of snowy flakes on a filmy 
white ground ? Why is it that one hates 
a book-agent? Because all these things 
are an insult to personality. Such devices 
crowd us and trench on our personal rights. 
We do not wish to have our wants too 
much anticipated, our decorations too 
clearly prescribed. We assert our right 
to find beautiful material where we will, 
and shape it to our own ends. We are 
unwilling to accept the personal concep- 
tion of the maker of curtains or napkins, 

lOI 



or of the book-agent as to what we ought 
to have, because he does not stand in that 
relation of real sympathy to us which 
alone could give him a right to advise. 

Ideas as well as men and things have 
their individuality and receive personal 
shaping when loved and brooded over by 
the human spirit. Professor Springer, writ- 
ing on Italian Art, says : " In accordance 
with an admirable custom of classic anti- 
quity, the once perfected type of a plastic 
figure was not again arbitrarily abandoned, 
but rigidly adhered to and continually re- 
produced." Here again we have the indi- 
vidual type fixed and definite. When an 
artist wished to make a Venus, Bacchus, 
or Mars, so much was settled for him in 
advance, and the statue he produced had 
value only as expressing his personal atti- 
tude towards the type. It was the out- 
come of his individuality confronted with 
the individuality of the accepted norm. 

We shall do better work in many ways 
when we learn that none of us can wholly 
reshape the world's ideals, but that by 
yielding ourselves sympathetically to their 
intent we may each contribute a personal 
inflection that will have its value. It is 
much better in most cases to accept cer- 
tain fixed types and to vary within their 

I02 



limits than to strive for some novelty that 
shall overset precedent and drive previous 
forms out of the field. This is especially- 
true in architecture. A really beautiful 
creation recognizes the type with sympa- 
thy before it proceeds to make variations on 
it, just as a courteous speaker bows to his 
audience before beginning his discourse, 
or as a well-dressed woman follows the 
general lines of the prevailing fashion and 
yet makes some special adaptation of them 
to her individual face and figure. It thus 
puts the whole before the part, love be- 
fore mere individual truth. 

It is worth noting that all the most del- 
icate and subtle indications of personal 
quality can be better discerned and there- 
fore appreciated when many persons are 
doing die same simple and unquestioned 
deed, than when each is striving to assert 
himself in some untried field. The latter 
may cause more wonderment and talk, but 
the first has aroma and we take it to our 
hearts. 

Thus in the works of our hands as well 
as in our own lives we find that depar- 
tures from the main theme are beautiful 
only so long as we keep a sense that the 
main theme is there to relate them to. 
This is the secret of music, and of all 
103 



beauty ; the fixed as the source and spring 
of the varying ; infinite permutations pro- 
ceeding from a stationary root : personality, 
compact, resolute, reassuring, or changeful, 
elusive and perfume-like, yet always true 
to its individual basis. 



104 



V. EXISTENCE AND RELATION 



** C'est ainsi que la connaissance de la loi du mouve- 
ment des planetes n'est devcnue possible que lorsque 
rhomme eut repudie I'idee de rimmobilite de la 
terre." — Count Lyof N. Tolstoi, ** Les Fran9ais 
a Moscow," La Guerre et la Paixy vol. iv. 

** To the desire then, and pursuit of this whole, the 
name of Love is given." — Plato, Symposium. 

*' Not in the strength of duty but of love. 
Not as Fate wills, but as their comrades call. 
The stars of midnight in their orbits move. 
Each drawn to each, and all afire for all." 

Edmond Holmes, The Silence of Love. 




V. EXISTENCE AND RELATION 

?HE artist is a terrible ideal- 
ist. For him beauty alone 
lives. All else is but nega- 
tion. Beauty alone is the 
true, the good, and the per- 
manent. This creed, which sounds at first 
somewhat pagan, is found to have consid- 
erable moral stamina when we discover 
that what the serious artist means by the 
beautiful is not the merely melodious, soft, 
and superficially pleasing, but rather that 
which has expression, and reveals life and 
character. Life is the great essential of 
beauty. A work of art which expresses 
noble life, which refi*acts and multiplies our 
sense of living, even though it do this by 
painting a corpse, is a beautiful work. 

Probably no more profound definition 
of beauty can be given than this — that it 
is the expression of life. This definition 
includes and unites all lesser ones, because 
life unifies all the often contradictory ele- 
ments that go to the making of beauty — 
such, for instance, as strength and grace, 
rest and motion, simplicity and complex- 
ity, etc. Only life can bring these oppo- 
sites into harmonious and beautiful relation. 
Professor Van Dyke, writing in defence 
107 



of the homelier types of beauty expressed 
by the Dutch painters and by such a man 
as Millet, in contrast to the old-fashioned, 
strictly classical ideal, points out how ab- 
surd a Greek goddess would look in a 
French potato field — not more so, in 
truth, than Millet's broad-backed women 
would look in a Greek temple. In either 
case there would be no beauty because no 
possible fitness to the environment, and 
hence no expression of life. Life lies in 
the relation between man and his surround- 
ings. Of course there are many grades, 
many types of beauty, but modern art is 
showing us that man will not rest satisfied 
in any final definition of it less broad than 
life itself. Life is the supreme good, and 
beauty should be commensurate with it. 

Now the beauty of a tree, of a path, of 
anything we may choose to paint, is ren- 
dered, like the living beauty of a human 
face, by setting the parts in right relation, 
hence the artist, finding this to be uni- 
versally true, fears not to assert that beauty 
lies not so much in things in themselves, as 
in the relation in which they stand to one 
another. The mountain outline is beauti- 
ful against its background of sky — we 
cannot think of one without the other. 
The river and the lake borrow half their 
1 08 



charm from their banks, softly shelving, 
precipitous, grassy, or reed-grown. The 
red and white spotted cows against the 
pasture grass, the white mare standing with 
her foal under the apple-tree, her coat dap- 
pled with patches of sunlight and opal 
shadow, the tiger in the jungle, the deer in 
the forest, all have their beauty, not so 
much in themselves as in the relation in 
which they stand to other things. The 
beauty of a single object also is found to 
depend on the right relation of its parts. 
Take a rose for instance, which is a com- 
bination of elements brought together by 
nature with surpassing art. Separate these 
elements, strip the rosy petals from the 
coronal of golden stamens set on their pale 
green disk, cut away the leaves, break the 
flower from the stem whose claret thorns 
and modulations of green and red sum up 
the color scheme of the plant, and the 
beauty is gone. Each of the elements has 
a certain beauty of its own, a beauty of 
form, texture, and color, but the life of the 
rose, its loveliness, its meaning, come from 
their combination and the relation that 
each part bears to all the rest. Hence we 
may truly say that the rose, as such, ex- 
ists just by virtue of that relation. The 
somewhat technical words ensemble and 
109 



values bear witness to the artist's habit- 
ual recognition of the importance of this 
truth. The ensemble, correctly translated 
by " the altogether," means the whole, but 
the whole as conceived in its manifoldness, 
while the values mean the parts, but the 
parts only as they stand in relation to each 
other and to the whole. 

The artist's creed is absolute idealism, 
so far as his own work is concerned. Not 
only the life and beauty of things, but their 
actual existence is a matter of relation. 
The trouble with him is that he does not 
often carry his creed to its ultimate con- 
clusion and apply it to morals as well as 
to art. If he did this he could see that his 
finest picture, though a whole in itself, is 
yet but a part of the greater whole of hu- 
man life, and must therefore express the 
soundness and health, rather than the cor- 
ruption and decay of that life, if it would 
have permanent value. Art, literature, 
human life itself, twist themselves into 
many grotesque and unwholesome shapes 
for want of faith in this simple principle 
of relation which, once accepted, sends a 
purifying breeze through all dark and 
stagnant places. 

Art gives us a great vantage ground for 
high reasoning because, with her assertion 
no 



that beauty alone has living reality and 
that all else should be, and is sure ulti- 
mately to be, neglected and left to perish 
from its own unrelatedness, she disposes of 
a number of our most troublesome ethi- 
cal problems. Her creed is an all-sufficient 
one if, as we have just said, she accepts it 
in its full length and breadth and will call 
nothing beautiful that is not so in virtue of 
its highest relations. Once accept this po- 
sition; assume the whole, and force every- 
thing to face towards it, and the old-fash- 
ioned dualism between good and evil as 
equal powers disappears, and in its stead 
we have left only the beautiful and charac- 
ter-building opposition between two kinds 
of good. Curiously enough, as this change 
becomes apparent in our spiritual attitude, 
an analogous change has taken place in the 
artist's color scheme. Since he began some 
years ago to make it his principal business 
to paint light, he has wholly eschewed the 
use of black as a pigment, and has painted 
all shadows with purple, which is the union 
of red and blue, telling us truly that " there 
is no black in nature." 

In order to get the benefit ethically and 

scientifically of the artist's creed, we must, 

as has just been said, assume the whole and 

force everything to face towards it. For 

III 



the artist the ensemble is both the beginning 
and the end of his work, and he knows that 
it is at his peril that he loses sight of it on 
the way. We, on the other hand, tend to 
make wholes of ourselves and our material 
interests, and are slow to view ourselves as 
but parts in relation to the greatest Whole 
of all. But if we would at the outset as- 
sume the whole, and try to estimate all life 
in relation to that, simply as a matter of 
practical wisdom, the world would move 
towards perfection much faster than it does 
now. Yet to assume the whole when we 
do not quite know what it is made up of is 
a difficult matter. 

As was said in an earlier chapter, the ar- 
tist has two methods of serving the whole. 
He may think of it as the ensemble or as 
the values. He may have some rounded 
and complete conception, some epic com- 
position which prescribes the place and tone 
of every object on the canvas, as was the 
way of the great masters — or he may let 
himself be inspired by the spirit of the 
whole, that is, by his strong instinctive 
sense of relative values, and may, as is the 
practice nowadays, record endless different 
groups of these values without attempt- 
ing composition on a larger scale. The 
justification for this modern proceeding is 

112 



that if would be impossible to execute 
large cornpositions with that absolute verity 
of lighting and tone which the modern 
mind (iemands. It is of course to be said 
that tl^e old masters suggested a beauty 
beyon4 the merely actual, because they 
were rtot in thrall to the actual ; but how- 
ever tJiis may be, we of to-day paint the 
tempef of to-day, and cannot well do other- 
wise. There is much to be gained in paint- 
ing just by working in the spirit of right 
relatioi% which inculcates teachableness, a 
reverei"it observation of nature, and obedi- 
ence t() her laws. 

No\^ if ethically we take a leaf from the 
moderA artist's book, and feel, like him, 
that ar^y absolute conception of wholeness 
is beyc>nd our powers (such hesitation in- 
dicating often a deeper reverence), we can, 
like hiiTi, fall back on the values, the spirit 
of right relation, which, because it is the 
spirit pf that unseen but deeply trusted 
whole, can guide us into completeness of 
life. The whole becomes to us then the 
Idea tl^at underlies all right relations and 
causes their rightness, and holding it thus 
as an ideal but indispensable concept, we 
can tuHi our attention to the study of 
the relations themselves, and see how by 
means of these all things exist. The law 
"3 



of relation seems to be the great fluid law 
(if such a term may be allowed) which 
produces life by its interaction with the law 
of definite form. It is motion acting upon 
matter to produce new matter, which in 
turn engenders fresh motion. It is much 
easier to study the definite forms in life 
than their relation to one another, but we 
may get the same advantage from the study 
of relation tliat the modem student of birds 
gets from watching them alive and on the 
wing instead of shot and dissected; we may 
learn something of life itself 

We tried to show in an earlier chapter 
that individuality (which word we use in 
the broadest sense to mean definite and 
recognizable quality wherever we find it) 
is due to some special adjustment of two 
opposing elements which we assume as the 
basis of all things, and which stand in a per- 
manent and fundamental relation to each 
other. As symbols of these elements let 
us take the perpendicular and horizontal, 
which are two mutually dependent im- 
pressions owing their individual existence 
wholly to their mutual relation, since the 
perpendicular is such only by virtue of its 
relation to the horizontal, and vice versa. 
Accepting this fundamental relation — sim- 
ply expressed by the cross — we have, as 
114 



a result of it, the basis for an exact defini- 
tion of every slant, and thus relativity be- 
comes the ground of reality and assurance. 
Individuality, therefore, which we may 
liken to a slanting line and which seems a 
fixed and definite thing, is afi:er all a mat- 
ter of relation, but of relation to something 
which is fundamental and therefore eternal 
and unchangeable, though in itself made 
up of opposing tendencies. 

Applying this to the human individual, 
we may argue that there is in every one, 
because of this relation to the eternal, a 
basis of ideas, or at least of fundamental 
truth, antecedent to those external impres- 
sions which are now thought to account 
(by means of the sub-conscious self) for 
all our experiences. The same truth is in 
us, and is to be expressed through us, that 
is expressed in all nature ; but because we 
are a higher expression of the whole, we 
are able to refine upon, and give meaning 
to, the truth suggested by the existences 
below us. Doubtless the shapes of things 
are put into our minds by means of im- 
pressions from without, but because we 
have the meaning of these shapes set deep 
within us we can often explain them to 
themselves. This is our experience with 
the perpendicular and the horizontal. Cliffs 

115 



by the sea, trees growing on a plain, etc., all 
suggest the right angle by their relation to 
that from which they rise, yet the rigid per- 
pendicular and horizontal forming the right 
angle are seldom found in nature, unless in 
some inconspicuous crystals. How is it 
then that man, who does not see the exact 
perpendicular and horizontal in nature, has 
made these lines the basis of all his struc- 
tures, and feels uncomfortable when any 
building does not conform to them, unless 
the ideal perpendicular and horizontal are 
deep within him so that he grasps the under- 
lying essence of the lines of tree and plain, 
and expresses it simply, or with complex- 
ity, in his own structures ? It is probably 
true that it is his naked, instinctive sense 
of perpendicular and horizontal — his own 
uprightness on the level earth — that gives 
him the standard whereby he derives plea- 
sure from the variations upon it, such as 
the graceful divergences of the trunks of 
palm or pine, or the waving of a field of 
grain when the wind sweeps over it"^ 

^ It seems possible also, since the sense of perpen- 
dicular and horizontal are so fundamental, that sea- 
sickness may be caused by the temporary confusing of 
this sense. As soon as one is able to accommodate 
himself to the motion of the ship so that he can keep 
his own perpendicular in spite of the ship's variations, 
he becomes well. 

ii6 



We may take the cross then as the 
symbol of life, of that perfect relation be- 
tween the two fundamental elements which 
constitutes absolute being. Every human 
individual, therefore, must be such by vir- 
tue of some divergence from this type, and 
consequently of some definite relation to it, 
and the influence of the cross upon him 
must be to reconform his personality to 
the original type. Under all the endless 
modifications of race, family, environment, 
and a thousand other causes, this must be 
broadly true. Letting the cross then sym- 
bolize for us that relation of the primal 
elements by which each is absolutely it- 
self and yet capable of becoming the other 
(as the perpendicular changes to the hori- 
zontal when we turn the cross a quarter 
way round), we see that we hold our indi- 
viduality by virtue of our relation to the 
cross. The cross represents also our " way 
of salvation," to use a well-worn theologi- 
cal phrase, because the perfect type is ever 
wooing us to cast off the too individual 
excrescences of our development and con- 
form ourselves to its likeness. 

Now if the individuality of each human 

being and also that of cities and nations 

is due to some fresh relation of opposing 

elements, why may not the same be true 

117 



of all individuality, even that of a dog, a 
flower, or a leaf? Can we not believe 
that out of the interaction of the two ele- 
ments has been evolved every fixed type 
that the earth knows, whether of races of 
men, animals, plants, or crystals, and that 
within the limits of these types the same 
two elements have differentiated each spe- 
cies into the diversities of countless indi- 
viduals? There can be no limit to the 
working of a fundamental law. Is not 
the conception of two original elements 
perfectly united in the whole, and yet 
capable of separation and recombination 
on so many planes and in so many forms 
of adjustment that no human brain can 
conceive the infinite complexity of it all, 
— is not this conception sufficient to ac- 
count for all the phases of evolution, both 
in the production of new types and the 
modification of these types through fresh 
combinations ? 

Now where shall we find these elements 
in their most primal and fundamental char- 
acters? Shall we hunt for them among 
the microscopic cells of matter, or in the 
world of spirit ? Doubtless they can be 
found in either, but if our whole argu- 
ment from art with its creative experience 
be worth anything, it is the central thought 
ii8 



and meaning of any whole that gives it 
life, rather than any form, however subtle 
and wonderful, in which that thought may 
be embodied. The relation of the cells of 
matter to each other must be more impor- 
tant than the cells themselves, and this rela- 
tion can never be studied by the microscope 
but must be accepted as a living principle 
before its working can be understood. The 
question of spirit and matter is simply 
the question of centre and circumference. 
The whole is equally present in both. The 
external wholeness of things, that is, the 
material world with all its forms, is the 
phase that from long familiarity we have 
the most assured confidence in, but the 
artist reinforces our taith in the interior 
and unseen phase by asserting that whole- 
ness is really the central truth of things, 
and circumference a matter of secondary 
importance. It is interesting to note how 
different minds are inclined temperament- 
ally to one or the other of these two phases 
of wholeness. M. Edouard Rod has pointed 
out that the English and Russian novelists 
present their characters by a process of 
development, one event following another 
until a certain unity is evolved through a 
sequence of details, whereas the French 
begin with the unity, the vivid personal 
119 



whole, and show us through some dra- 
matic incident the inmost nature of the 
man as it is revealed under the stress of 
passion. Many persons will think that 
the English and Russian is the most com- 
plete method. " You have not given us 
the whole life," they will say, " unless you 
have told us the man's birth and ancestry, 
and the circumstances that made him what 
he was." The French genius, however, 
conceives of wholeness in the sense in 
which it is used in this book, namely, as 
that inner verity of things which causes 
circumstances quite as much as it results 
from them. The French painter Rous- 
seau writes in a letter to a pupil, " Let us 
understand the word ' finish.' What fin- 
ishes a picture is not the quantity of de- 
tails. It is the truth of the ensemble. A 
picture is limited not by the frame alone. 
Whatever the subject, there is a principal 
object to which the eyes are constantly to 
be borne. The other objects are only the 
complement of this and interest us less. 
Beyond that there is nothing more for the 
eye. These then are the true limits of a 
picture. If your picture, on the contrary, 
contains a precise detail, equal from end 
to end of the canvas, it will be regarded 
with indifference ; all interesting the spec- 

I20 



tator equally, nothing will interest him. 
You will never have finished," In this 
brief quotation is summed up the whole 
philosophy that we are trying to set forth. 
Only the central truth, the meaning, is of 
real import in life, and when we strive for 
a perfection, or " finish " as the artist calls 
it, which has no relation to that, we are 
only weakening the effect of our picture. 

Thus the interior aspect of wholeness is 
its most vital aspect, though its exterior 
presentation is more familiar to us. Both 
are equally characteristic of it, one cannot 
exist without the other, but for us in our 
present condition at least, it is most need- 
ful to dwell on the side of interior mean- 
ing, the side that binds all the parts to- 
gether because of their relation to the 
greatest Whole of all. Material things, 
being their own evidence, may be trusted 
to take care of themselves. The meaning 
of life must be sought often through blood 
and tears. 

This deeper truth of man's wholeness is 
much called in question to-day. Our mo- 
rality, as well as our science, tends to be- 
come empirical, and the secular spirit 
threatens to take the place of the religious 
ideal. The only thing that can save us, 
and restore the dreams of the world's 

121 



youth to it as substantial verities, is some 
principle that shall unite the exterior and 
the interior, the material and the spiritual, 
in one luminous conception. The law of 
the whole offers us precisely such a princi- 
ple, because it combines in itself the na- 
tures of the exterior and of the interior 
worlds; and by drawing our attention to 
relation as greater than fixed fact or exist- 
ence, it loosens our thought from the solid 
forms of the material world and fixes it on 
the expressive connection between these 
forms as the true reality. Moreover, be- 
cause of that interchangeableness of its ele- 
ments to which we have referred (every 
part being also a whole, and every whole 
conceivably a part of something greater) 
it has a quality of motion, a suggestion 
of counter-currents, that gives it great 
vitality and elasticity as an implement of 
thought. 

Since it is the fundamental principle of 
relation that the largest conceivable Whole 
must prescribe the attitude of all its com- 
ponent parts, there seems to be no stop- 
ping-place in our application of the law of 
the whole in the regions above man. We 
can take the earth, the solar system, or even 
the universe, as our largest conceivable 
Whole and see it evolving, by means of 

122 



its dual elements, into a complete expres- 
sion of itself. But if the life process is to 
go on, every whole once evolved to its 
perfection as that particular whole must 
continue to live by entering into yet higher 
combinations; so we can never think of 
any whole as final ; we can only say that 
the law of relation and its sanctions must 
come down to us from the largest con- 
ceivable Whole, whatever that may be, and 
leave the matter there. 

Yet there is one other way of looking at 
it. The law of the whole involves always 
two elements : the whole is related to the 
part, as truly as the part is related to the 
whole ; neither is independent of the other. 
This of course is ideally true. The desi- 
deratum is to bring about a living recog- 
nition between them. Such recognition 
must of necessity begin from the side of 
the whole, because the part would have 
no capacity to recognize the whole ex- 
cept as the whole imparted to it something 
of itself A wave of recognition must 
therefore be started from the whole to- 
wards the part. Now it is conceivable that 
if we could ever attain to the point of 
view of the whole, all our ideas of mag- 
nitude might be reversed, and we might 
see the parts in their manifold ignorance 
123 



and painful confusion, as making so pro- 
found an appeal that the recognition of the 
whole would instinctively flow down to 
the very magnitude of the need as to some- 
thing greater than itself Power would 
thus be converted into pity and love, 
and the part and the whole would change 
places. This must be that infinite self-for- 
getting to which we referred in a previ- 
ous chapter. We get suggestions of it 
even from our own lives, for while ideally 
we make all sacrifices in the direction of, 
and for the sake of^ an ideal of duty which 
is greater than ourselves, yet practically we 
make them towards those who are weaker, 
more needy, and more suffering than we 
are ; we give ourselves to our children and 
our dependents, to all that for which we 
feel responsible because it seems to be in- 
cluded in our own life. 

If this be so, the condition is fulfilled of 
a larger relation for the whole to enter 
into as essential to its continued life. Yet 
it would be a relation included within it- 
self Instead then of stretching our minds 
beyond the universe to an inconceivable 
unknown as a necessary postulate for the 
immortal life of man, we may find that 
the universe itself has a final limit at the 
point where the accumulation of love and 
124 



compassion starts that down-streaming cur- 
rent which is needed to vitalize all the up- 
rising current of human endeavor.^ 

If then the principle of wholeness, mani- 
fested as the law of relation, works end- 
lessly both above and below us, and reaches 
from the top to the bottom of the universe, 
it frees our thought from bondage to mat- 
ter as to anything final, and in its own 
nature fundamental. Matter exists, form 
exists ; there could be no recognizable ex- 
pression without them. Existence is thus 
half the truth of the whole, but the other 
half^ and the one we need most now to 
have practically set forth, is the greatness of 
relation as binding all forms of existence 

^ Sir William Crookes is reported as saying in an 
address delivered in 1888: "If we may hazard any 
conjecture as to the source of energy embodied in a 
chemical atom, we may, I think, premise that the 
heat radiations propagated outward through the ether 
from the ponderable matter of the universe, by some 
process of nature not yet known to us, are transformed 
at the confines of the universe into the primary — the 
essential motions of chemical atoms, which, the in- 
stant they are formed, gravitate inwards, and thus re- 
store to the universe the energy which otherwise would 
be lost to it through radiant heat. If this conception 
be well founded. Sir William Thompson's startling 
prediction of the final decrepitude of the universe 
through the dissipation of its energy falls to the 
ground." 

125 



into a rational and beautiful order. We 
may think of existence as the individual 
principle or truth of fact ; as that identity 
which each form carries within itself and 
which is manifested in all the upward grow- 
ing and outward blossoming movement of 
the material world. Then we may think of 
relation as the universal principle or truth 
of love, which presses down on us all from 
the whole and interacts with the individ- 
ual principle to bring about a condition of 
harmony and perfection. 

As we thus think, however, we must re- 
member that we are drawing the form of 
our thoughts from the external world which 
estimates greatness by bulk. Hence we 
see the individual principle, or what sci- 
ence calls the law of development, work- 
ing from centre to circumference, from the 
less to the greater, towards expansion, as 
from the small seed to the mighty tree, 
and the universal principle working from 
the circumference inward towards the centre 
to repress, restrain, and dominate. It is pre- 
cisely because of this our instinctive way 
of conceiving things, that the pressure of 
relation as it meets us in the discipline of 
life appears to us at first as something to be 
resisted because tending to curtail our free- 
dom. We may get relief from this dread, 
126 



even intellectually, by means of the truth 
taught by art, namely: that the universal 
principle, although the greater, is really the 
most central truth, and works from within 
outward towards the highest development, 
while the individual principle, although ap- 
pearing to expand things, really tends to 
contract and to limit, except as it is held 
in check by the universal. The experience 
of this truth is of course purely a spiritual 
or inner experience in which the central 
wholeness of man yields to the wholeness 
of God, yet as we have said, some intelli- 
gent understanding of the need for it may 
be gained from the line of thought here set 
forth. 

Leaving aside, however, the question of 
circumference and centre, we may say that 
the principle of wholeness has two manifes- 
tations, which turn into each other according 
to our point of view. It is a living Spirit 
and seems to breathe as we see it contracting 
and expanding ; shaping the elements into 
wholes and then modifying them by their 
relation to larger wholes; and thus moving 
life ever onward towards higher forms in 
which the previous ones are included and 
yet made more free. 

It is worth noting, as we sum up what 
has been said, that in all this reasoning the 
127 



whole is our only postulate, and this does 
not seem a great concession, although in 
a certain sense it is taking everything for 
granted. Because as the basis of every 
whole open to our investigation we find an 
idea, we conclude that a living whole is 
an idea conscious of itself As we find 
every idea to be made up of contrasting 
elements, we conclude that contrasting ele- 
ments are essential to the nature of the 
whole, that they are always present and 
that there is a mutual relation between 
them. This relation then becomes an ob- 
ject of study as the living Spirit of the 
whole, and forms a duality with the whole 
in its capacity of singleness as conceived 
at first, so that the Whole is both one and 
two, both whole and parts, both existence 
and relation, both rest and motion, both 
matter and spirit. 

Out of this beginning all the rest can be 
spun, and the fact that the spirit of whole- 
ness works in two directions and compacts 
as well as relates, may explain the appear- 
ance of definite forms during the process 
of evolution, which if we thought of life as 
only an outward blossoming impulse we 
should be at a loss to account for. To ex- 
plain the facts we need the idea of a counter 
current, a force that draws in while another 
128 



expands, a refreshing and renewing stream 
that assures the continuance of life even 
though all the forms in which life is now 
manifested should change and sublimate. 
Our argument has shown us that such a 
current must exist. It is the great stream 
of relation, less obvious to our senses than 
existence or matter, but equally real, and 
for us now more important to recognize. 
We know it as Love, and no scheme of 
philosophy, no theory of matter even, can 
be complete which leaves this element out 
of account. Love and truth, relation and 
existence, mutually producing, mutually 
modifying, mutually vitalizing one another ; 
these alone are sufficient to frame a uni- 
verse, and tune its myriad voices to one 
hymn of joy. 

When we say that love, which is the 
highest manifestation of the sense of rela- 
tion, must have been present in man from 
the beginning as an essential factor in his 
development, we must guard our defini- 
tion of the word love. Love, when we 
think of it merely as a primitive passion, 
is greedy and selfish, so instead of supply- 
ing the factor that we need in studying 
the process of evolution, it seems rather to 
reinforce the disintegrating tendencies of 
individualism. For this reason the term 
129 



relation serves our purpose better, because 
it signifies the most binding and unifying 
influence that we know of, quite apart from 
any human embodiment of it in either man 
or woman. Relation expresses itself doubt- 
less through the human passion of sex, but 
has a much deeper and larger meaning as 
the law of the whole, finding its highest 
manifestation as self-surrender, while at the 
same time it is just as genuinely present in 
the cohesion of physical atoms. 

The argument of this book has been 
quite wasted if we have not made it clear 
Aat this relation of which we speak is a 
very different thing from that " relativity " 
which is a commonplace in Greek as well 
as in modem philosophy, or at least that it 
is a very diflferent way of interpreting the 
same phenomena. 

" The doctrine of relativity," to quote 
Canon Aubrey Moore, " is made the basis, 
both in ancient and modern times, of two 
opposite conclusions: Either it is argued 
that as all sense knowledge is relative, and 
as sense is the only organ of knowledge, 
therefore real knowledge is impossible ; or 
else the relativity of sense knowledge leads 
men to draw a sharp contrast between sense 
and reason, and to turn away from the out- 
ward in order to listen to the inward voice. 
130 



The one alternative is scepticism, the other 
idealism." 

Thus there has always been a dilemma, 
and opinion has been divided between 
scepticism and belief, materialism and 
idealism, pessimism and optimism, ac- 
cording as men's natures have identified 
them with one alternative or the other. 
The advance of science has forced thinkers 
to recognize a unity as underlying all phe- 
nomena, but as they have felt that this 
unity stands aloof from, if it be not anta- 
gonistic to, human happiness, the modern 
mind has become pessimistic. Feeling no 
sympathetic relation between themselves 
and the Whole, men have widened the 
breach yet more and got themselves seri- 
ously out of relation by following their un- 
bridled instincts. 

Suppose, however, instead of dwelling on 
the opposition, the parts, which taken by 
themselves are but confused fragments, we 
look at the world and at human life from 
the side of the Whole, which is its probable 
inner meaning. One may say that this is 
what the church has been trying to do all 
along. True, but she has never yet suc- 
ceeded in explaining the scientific and in- 
evitable connection between the whole and 
the parts, and her conception of God has 

131 



even been capable of producing such a 
stanza as 

** Our lives through various scenes are drawn 
And vexed with trifling cares. 
While Thine eternal thought moves on 
Thine undisturbed affairs." 

If God's own advocate among men has had 
such an imperfect understanding of his na- 
ture as this would indicate, there is surely 
an opportunity for art to bring forward her 
experience to show that relation is the liv- 
ing law of the whole, and that therefore 
the interests of God and man must, in the 
last analysis, be identical. 

As relation works in two directions, first 
compacting elements into units, and then 
modifying them by their relation to larger 
units, it is the secret both of matter and of 
motion, of the fixed and the changing, as 
well as of the relation between these two. 
Both painting and music are founded on 
this latter phase of relation; both derive 
their charm from the mutual adjustment 
of unity and sequence. In fact, the distinc- 
tion between painting and music lies in their 
differing adjustments of these two elements, 
so that they furnish excellent illustrations 
of the principle of interchangeableness. In 
painting, the picture itself supplies the ele- 
ment of unity and the beholder that of 
132 



sequence or motion, as his eye roams over 
one part of the picture after another and 
enjoys the manner in which they are all 
related to the whole. In music, the lis- 
tener supplies the element of unity and the 
music that of sequence or motion, as the 
melody unfolds itself, faints, hovers, re- 
tums, and plays every imaginable caprice, 
confident that the ear of the listener will 
hold to the connection of its parts, and will 
assent with satisfaction to its final chords. 
In both the meaning is expressed by di- 
versity in relation to unity, although, as 
we contrast them with each other, painting 
seems more akin to rest, and music to 
motion. 

When we get hold of this conception we 
find that instead of suffering from a hope- 
less confusion of shifting elements such as 
the doctrine of relativity implies, we rejoice 
in movement and interplay as a sign that 
we are dealing with that which has life and, 
through its eternal capacity for change, an 
etemal power to renew and refresh itself. 
From Heraclitus there has been a long 
line which, to quote Canon Moore again, 
"through Plato, and Dionysius the Areo- 
pagite, and John the Scot in the ninth 
century, and Meister Eckhart in the thir- 
teenth, and Jacob Boehme in the sixteenth, 

^33 



reaches down to Hegel." These have seen 
the necessary connection between opposites 
and have therefore asserted their identity 
in mystical fashion. But identity is not a 
satisfactory term. It sounds so far from 
reasonable that the mystics have incurred 
contempt. We shall come nearer the 
truth, and at the same time be more lucid if, 
assuming that a relation of opposites is the 
basis of every whole, we see in relation itself 
the highest, most spiritual form of truth, 
the living Spirit of both the whole and the 
parts, the fixed and the changing, the ma- 
terial and the spiritual. This may seem like 
identifying opposites again, but it identifies 
them only by spiritualizing them and lift- 
ing them to a higher plane, since relation 
as the Spirit of the whole is always greater 
than any of its material embodiments. 

Interchangeableness is a better word than 
identity, but it is only in dealing with spirit- 
ual verities that we appreciate its true mean- 
ing. Mr. Spencer notes the interchange- 
ableness of the dual elements and sums it 
up as follows : " See then our predicament. 
We can think of matter only in terms of 
mind. We can think of mind only in terms 
of matter. When we have pushed our ex- 
plorations of the first to the uttermost limit 
we are referred to the second for a final 
134 



answer : and when we have got the final 
answer of the second we are referred back 
to the first for an explanation of it. We 
find the value of x in terms oiy : then we 
find the value of y in terms of x, and so 
on. We may continue forever without 
coming nearer to a solution." So he is 
tossed like a shuttlecock fi*om one possi- 
ble whole to another and finds no rest. 
Yet what if the ^igh^ of the shuttlecock 
be the very unity he is in search of, and 
the opposite elements be present and active 
only to keep it from falling to the ground ? 
For mind and matter let us substitute the 
higher duality of love and truth, and we 
shall not fear when we say that we can 
think of truth only in terms of love, and 
love only in terms of truth, for we know, 
through the deepest experiences of our 
lives, that except as there is this most inti- 
mate connection between them they have 
no reality. Pure love means an approach 
in which untruth shrivels like a dry leaf in 
the flame. Truth loveless has no vital 
quality. We can keep the two distinct 
in our thinking, yet the mystery of their 
union, the interplay of their subtle forces, 
is what lifts us continually out of the shift- 
ing and material into the calm assurance of 
an eternal reality. 

^3S 



It is hard to write about love in a dis- 
secting and scientific spirit, because the in- 
stant its pinions stir the air about us we 
long to throw down the scalpel and grasp 
the lyre. Yet if we can make clear the 
infinitely complex system of relations that 
binds the universe together, reaching from 
centre to circumference in one omnipresent 
scheme of life, and can show that love, 
whether we think of it as the pure glow 
round the hearthstone, the rosy ardor of 
young lovers, the white flame of self-de- 
votion, or the seraph's song, is in each of 
these degrees but relation become con- 
scious of itself and of the central fire, we 
can better appreciate the ideal grandeur of 
love and understand why its least touch 
thrills us with nameless rapture and visions 
that reach the stars. 

** Freude heiszt die starke Feder 

In der ewigen Natur, 
Freude, Freude, treibt die Rader 

In der grossen Welten Uhr. 
Blumen lockt sie aus den Keimen 

Sonnen aus dem Firmament, 
Spharen roUt sie in den Raumen 

Die des Sehers Rohr nicht kennt," 

is perhaps no poetical hyperbole, but the 
statement of a scientific truth. 

Looking at the whole as both the fixed 
136 



and the changing, and at life as made out 
of the relation between the two, we get a 
better understanding of the struggle, as 
old as civilization, between the Greek and 
Hebrew ideals. These two types are found 
everywhere and often rise in mortal com- 
bat in the inner life of the same individ- 
ual, the world of beauty fighting with the 
world of duty, and finding no final peace 
until each has learned the other's lesson. 
Neither alone holds the living truth. That 
is woven of the relation between the two. 
When beauty learns that she can never be 
immortal except as she is rightly related to 
the higher wholes of moral and spiritual 
life, and when duty learns that in her naked 
insistence on the moral and spiritual as the 
only real she has outstripped God himself, 
they may come at last to find in their mu- 
tual relation the secret of a perfect life. 

And the same is true of the great con- 
ceptions of Deity that we characterize, 
broadly speaking, as eastern and western 
thought, diough each has its undiscovered 
disciples in every New England hamlet. 
Some souls naturally adopt the personal 
conception of God that belongs to the 
West, while others are more attracted by 
the idea of the immanence of God that 
characterizes the thought of the East. Nei- 

137 



ther contains the whole truth, both have 
their Umitations. Western thought tends 
to represent God as a sledge-hammer, east- 
em thought vaporizes Him : or, to carry 
the figure farther, we may say that west- 
ern thought fixes on the piston-rod as the 
efficient force in the engine of life, while 
eastern thought dwells on the steam. We 
can see that it takes both to turn the driv- 
ing-wheels. Both are essential, and in pro- 
portion as we relate them to each other 
we gain a living conception of God. In 
fact, the mere opening of the mind to ad- 
mit an opposite view from the one we are 
naturally identified with seems in itself to 
reveal to us much of the divine nature. 
But in adopting the views of our eastem 
brethren, as is so much the fashion to-day, 
we must remember that their doctrine needs 
as much help firom ours as theirs gives to 
us, and therefore, instead of abandoning our 
past and embracing their ideas as a new and 
complete revelation, we must stand firm 
for the truth that is ours by birth and inher- 
itance, at the same time that we open our 
ears to their message. The whole will be 
found by means of a fruitful interchange 
of ideas. 

Except as we feel the immanence of 
God, nature is dead to us, and we live in 

138 



an alien world. Except as we feel the 
personality of God, both man and nature 
are orphaned, and expediency becomes the 
only rule of conduct. But we may have 
all the good and escape all the evil that is 
threatened by either view when taken by 
itself, if we see the living God as the union 
of his two attributes, as constituting, per- 
vading, and renewing nature and the physi- 
cal life of man, its highest form ; and at the 
same time as linking all beings together 
through the interior principle of relation 
so that his ear is open even to a sparrow's 
fall. 

We must have the personal idea of God. 
The thought of immanence, though in a 
certain sense a larger conception, differs 
from the thought of personality as steam 
heat differs from the fire that a maid kindles 
with pine cones in one's bedroom in the 
frosty dusk of a winter morning when one 
is just awake. The latter has charm, it is 
done for us and for us alone, and it draws 
out an inner warmth of feeling that can 
never be produced by the impartial radi- 
ator. Yet the radiator too has its advan- 
tages. If we think of God as personally 
occupied with us and with our concerns, 
we inevitably, since our idea of personality 
is limited by our experience as human be- 

^9 



ings, imagine Him as, for that moment at 
least, less occupied with other matters ; so 
the personal conception when taken by it- 
self limits our idea of Deity. If, however, 
we see personality as one phase of the 
whole, of which immanence is an equally 
important and coexistent phase, then we 
may turn to either as shall best serve our 
need at any particular moment. We may 
think of God as a loving Father who has 
brought us into being and who holds our 
highest possible development as part of 
his own life, or we may think of his liv- 
ing Spirit as around us in all nature, im- 
parting joy to us by our every recognition 
of its varying forms, and touching hands 
with us as we dabble our fingers in a 
mountain brook, or part the leafy branches 
in wandering through a forest. The con- 
ception of all personality as dependent on 
relation, and of the personality of God as 
the sum of all conceivable relations, makes 
such an attitude towards Him both pos- 
sible and reasonable. 



140 



VI. RECOGNITION 



'* Then shall I know even as also I am known." — 
St. Paul, i Corinthians xiii. 12. 

*' That which most strongly dominates these young 
intellects is the instinct of the relation between things, 
and the deep root that the real has in the invisible, in 
other words the sentiment of solidarity between men, 
the need of being associated in that universal human 
vibration which is the latent electricity of the moral 
world." — VicoMTE Eugene Melchoir de Vogue, 
** The Neo- Christian Movement in France," Harper^ s 
Magazine, January 18, 1892. 

** Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with 

Spirit can meet. 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands 

and feet." 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism. 




VI. RECOGNITION 

2E have endeavored in the pre- 
ceding chapter to made it clear 
that two great elements are 
everywhere present, and that 
in their mutual adjustment lies 
all the "promise and potency of life." 
When we bring this principle down to the 
concrete, however, and try to make a prac- 
tical application of it to our daily affairs, 
it is less easy to show that every problem 
is made up of a pair of elements. Most 
persons will insist that the elements are 
numerous, and that any reduction of them 
to a pair is artificial and arbitrary. In a 
human character for instance, all sorts of 
unexpected traits turn up, queer contradic- 
tions and aptitudes that we refer to some 
remote progenitor because we can find no 
justification of them near at hand, and it 
seems impossible to reduce all these to a 
pair of elements. In a picture likewise, 
the complex harmonies of line and color 
threaten to defy reduction. Yet we have 
seen that under the endless variations of 
which the November landscape for in- 
stance is capable, there can always be traced 
a broad division of its colors into purplish 
grays on the one hand and reddish browns 

H3 



on the other, and that there is power and 
advantage in so dividing them. We are safe 
in saying also that the nobihty and beauty 
of any artistic composition is greatly en- 
hanced when the relation of its main masses 
is simply and clearly expressed. Look at 
the Nicholson portraits and see, despite 
their exaggeration, what character is given 
by suppressing all surface detail and redu- 
cing the picture to a simple contrast be- 
tween two elements; the few light tones 
being so closely allied that they count really 
as but one tone in opposition to the strong 
masses of black. The teacher of a life-class 
feels that he has accomplished much when 
he has persuaded his pupils to simphfy all 
the half tones of the subject into one broad 
mass of light in clear contrast to the mass 
of shadow. Every artistic photographer 
finds that he gains much by blotting out un- 
necessary lights, and so simplifying a com- 
position. Such elimination gives, even to 
a photograph, a distinction that recalls the 
work of the old masters rather than the 
painting of to-day which occupies itself 
largely with the accidental. A composi- 
tion should never be bald, but intricacy and 
complexity cease to be beautiful as soon 
as we lose our sense of their relation to the 
main contrast. In a character too it is. just 
144 



here that we draw the line between charm- 
ing mutabiUty and senseless caprice. 

We feel in everything the need of a defi- 
nite basis from which all variations proceed 
and to which they may be referred, and we 
may be very sure that this basis has a dual 
nature since it is alike capable of produ- 
cing variations and of holding them in 
check. The fact that in every sub-depart- 
ment the duality again manifests itself and 
leads to fresh variations tends to draw our 
thoughts farther and farther from the main 
issue. Yet if the duality itself, or " rela- 
tion" as we have been calling it, is more 
essential than any of its manifestations, it 
is of the greatest importance that our atten- 
tion should be called back to it. 

It is not difHcult to show that two ele- 
ments are essential to an idea, and that they 
are present in the simplest sentence. In a 
complicated sentence this is less apparent, 
but if we strip the sentence of its qualify- 
ing words and dependent clauses, we can 
always reduce its main bearing to a pair of 
elements that mutually affect each other. 

All graceful motion implies a balance 
between two opposing tendencies. The 
skater who flings his body in a sidewise 
slant as he takes a long curving stroke, 
carries within him a sense of the opposite 

145 



and counterbalancing slant, which he in- 
stinctively brings into play at just the in- 
stant when the first slant threatens a loss 
of equilibrium. He really holds both mo- 
tions as one, whereas the inexperienced 
skater, being occupied wholly with one 
motion at a time, cannot quickly supple- 
ment it with the other and falls over on 
the first sidewise stroke. 

The vine and the spiral so much used 
in decoration are simple illustrations of the 
interaction of two elements as the basis 
of beautiful form. The ascending line is 
thrown from right to left, and then ftom 
left to right by the opposing forces, and 
on this simple foundation (which in harsher 
and more primitive decoration appears as 
the zigzag) are built all the lovely vines 
such as we see in mosaic in the apse of St. 
Mark's, in carved marble in the choir of 
the Cathedral of Siena, on the columns by 
the doors to the Baptistery at Pisa (where 
the duality is carried farther by setting the 
vines back to back), in the iron-work of 
the railing of the Loggia at Siena, and in 
other materials in numberless other places. 
When one has once grasped this idea it is 
surprising how hard it is to escape ftom 
seeing the manifestations of it. The same 
form turned first to right and then to left 
146 



seems to have a rhythmical movement in it 
like the fall of human footsteps, and this is 
the real charm of the vine in decoration, 
however much it may be disguised by leaf, 
flower, or tendril. 

If then we conclude that unity is always 
the product of two elements, we can see 
that if a third element be present it is in 
some sense as the source or the resultant of 
the other two. This is illustrated in poli- 
tics. There are always two great parties. 
If others appear, they are in some sense 
subordinate. It is true also in religion, 
for while the splitting up of the Christian 
world into sects is a matter both for laugh- 
ter and tears, there is yet a broad division 
which enables us to classify these sects as 
those, on the one hand, in whom the indi- 
vidual principle or right of private judg- 
ment predominates, and on the other those 
who tend to rest in authority or the univer- 
sal principle. Within the Protestant camp 
we find again the same opposing tenden- 
cies. Unitarians as contrasted with Episco- 
palians; and similar divisions exist among 
Catholics. 

In this omnipresent duality we have a 
powerful argument from the nature of things 
which will be of service in many directions. 
Intellectually it will help us greatly, for if, 

147 



in attacking any problem, we are convinced 
that, no matter how complicated it may 
look, there are really two main elements on 
whose mutual relation the matter hinges, 
we can set ourselves to find these elements 
at the beginning and hold fast to them 
through all our investigation. Morally it 
will help us by bringing into clearer light 
the two main elements of our own lives, 
namely, our individual integrity and our 
relation with the universal. We need to 
have our individual integrity and the high 
sanctions of it assured to us, so that we 
may stand up sturdily for our own point 
of view, and may realize the eternal worth 
of all our honest witnessing to truth and 
beauty, whether we utter it in poem, statue, 
or lullaby, whether our instrument be the 
microscope, the harp, or the locomotive. 
Then, yet more, since the tendency of this 
same integrity of ours is to fence us off, we 
need a constant reminder of our duty to 
recognize the other element in life — the 
one with which we are not by nature most 
identified. As individuals we stand chiefly 
for one element or the other, since there is 
a preponderance of one over the other in 
our natural make-up, although both ele- 
ments are inevitably present in us. As 
individuals, then, we need to recognize 
148 



the claims of other individuals whose ideas 
differ from our own. Such recognition is 
the basis of all social life which may be 
likened to the graceful curves with which 
the vine sways from one side to the other. 
Then collectively we need to recognize 
our relation to God, which relation is the 
highest form in which the duality appears, 
and may be likened to the impulse which 
draws the vine upward in a steady ascent 
that is never lost sight of in any of its lat- 
eral curves, but tends rather to strengthen 
those curves and keep them even. Then 
there is yet one other recognition needed by 
us, namely, that of the opposing and often 
suppressed element in ourselves. By such 
recognition we develop our full and true 
individuality, which may be likened to the 
blossoms and graceful tendrils that adorn 
the vine's growth. 

Each of these three recognitions in a 
way involves the rest. Our collective re- 
cognition of God is really the same as our 
recognition of the rights and claims of our 
fellow-creatures; while our personal, inte- 
rior recognition of Him is the same as the 
recognition of the other element in our- 
selves. God, as the whole, is involved in 
all our recognitions, and lies at the basis of 
them all. We recognize Him as benefi- 
149 



cent law and order through our highest 
social conception of our relation to our 
fellow-men, and of their relations to each 
other, and we recognize Him as an inward 
personal impulse when we allow Him, at 
the cost of some suffering to ourselves, to 
bring into harmonious action both the ele- 
ments that go to make up the individual- 
ity that He has given us. All this is proof 
of our former statement that but two ele- 
ments are really present, — the individual 
and the universal, man and God, — but 
according as we look at the problem we 
see God identifying himself first with one 
element and then with the other so as to 
establish a relation or motion between 
them. It is a good deal as — to revert to 
our mechanical simile — the steam enters 
first one end of a locomotive cylinder and 
then the other, the result being the driv- 
ing of the piston. Of course God really 
moves in both ways simultaneously; but as 
we lack that fourth dimension of thought 
which would enable us to see two oppo- 
site actions as one^ we have to be satisfied 
with considering half the problem at a 
time. We should always remember that 
our personal, interior recognition of God 
must never blind our eyes to his social 
and collective aspects, and vice versa^ since 
150 



He is both centre and circumference and 
the relation between the two. Mystics 
and cloistered ascetics have limited their 
recognition of God to the interior phase : 
the secular spirit of latter-day civilization 
limits its recognition of Him to the social 
and collective phase. 

It would seem, if our analogy from art 
be worth anything, that all relations are 
ideally fixed for every child that comes 
into the world, and that all he has to do is 
to discover them. This conception strikes 
us at first as somewhat hard and limiting; 
as if our freedom were only apparent, only 
the result of our ignorance of conditions, 
so that the more completely we get into 
right relation the less freedom we shall 
have. To be " fixed in an eternal state " 
is a ghastly prospect, and such would be 
our destiny if the analogy from a picture 
were a complete one. But again the dual 
nature of wholeness comes to our relief 
There is the flowing, musical side also. 
The element of fixedness is only half the 
truth. The whole consists both of the 
fixed and the varying. Both are essential 
to beauty, and in comparing painting with 
music we have seen that the two elements 
may be interchangeably either in the per- 
cipient or in the work itself, and that our 



joy in both comes from the relation be- 
tween the two elements. In like manner 
our joy in life must come through a rela- 
tion between the whole and the parts, but 
endless variety is assured to us by the fact 
that we ourselves may act interchangeably 
in either of these capacities. We may be 
sometimes wholes or heads, which gather 
up and give meaning to many parts, as 
when we direct some large enterprise ; or 
we may become parts of some greater 
whole and rest from heavy responsibility 
by obediently doing a bit of simple service 
with our hands. Thus the number of re- 
lations or combinations open to us is prac- 
tically infinite. 

It is doubtless true that as we perfect 
our relations on any plane of life a certain 
fixedness or, to speak more accurately, a 
certain wholeness results. We are thank- 
ful that it is so, and that some depart- 
ments of our activity become so thoroughly 
understood by us that they no longer de- 
mand attention. It is our constant expe- 
rience that we grow unconscious of things 
as we master them. They become to us 
the certainty of the one rather than the 
confusion of the many. Processes, such 
as walking, dressing, spelling, the learning 
of which was once a business in itself and 
152 



for the time took all our interest and atten- 
tion, become at last automatic, and leave 
us free to act without consciousness of 
them, although they contribute an enlarged 
basis for all our future activity. It is in a 
similar sense alone that our personality 
tends to become fixed. It takes on unity 
or wholeness by virtue of right relation, 
only that as a whole it may be capable of 
entering into yet higher relations. Such 
wholeness as this we deeply long for as 
we mourn our failures to speak and act 
aright, for we are conscious that we seldom 
speak and act as well as our whole self 
would dictate if it were always fully in 
evidence. Weary with the struggle, we 
long not only to speak the truth, but to be 
the truth and to have such interior whole- 
ness that right words and deeds shall flow 
from us spontaneously like the song of a 
bird. 

If we do not make relations for our- 
selves, but simply recognize the possibili- 
ties in this direction that already exist for 
us, a large part of our duty and happiness 
in life must lie in recognition, using the 
word to mean always an inward acceptance 
of, and identification of oneself with, the 
object recognized. Recognition may of 
course be merely intellectual and external. 



as when we acknowledge that a thing is 
there and yet stand quite apart from it. This 
is our attitude towards external things in 
general, and the very impersonality of it 
enables us to classify and estimate them 
impartially, so that in its place it has great 
value. It is the proper attitude of science. 
But life-giving recognition is of a deeper 
sort. It takes place in that "darkness more 
bright than noonday" of the inner life, and 
is most central and personal. We greatly 
need this gospel of inner recognition to- 
day, because the world is over-intent on 
seeing with its eyes and hearing with its 
ears and exploring with its fingers even 
the wound-prints of the Lord before it will 
believe. Not so shall it find the Whole. 

Perfect recognition is perfect love, but 
the word recognition serves us better here, 
because, being a matter of the will, it is 
quite within our control, whereas love 
sometimes fails us, because of the hardness 
of our hearts, just when we most need its 
guidance. Love's " unerring light " is often 
a joyous accompaniment of our recogni- 
tions, but we can be, and are often called 
to be, true to some relation in which love 
as an emotion seems to have no part. 

Of course it is easy for us to recognize 
those persons whom we like, or are like, 

154 



which is perhaps somewhat the same thing. 
Even a marked diversity between two 
people, provided there be some funda- 
mental point of contact, often enables them 
to supplement each other, and is thus a 
source of attraction. Recognition in these 
cases takes care of itself; but the great 
recognition, that which takes in every hu- 
man being, no matter how degraded, as 
equally with ourselves an integrant part 
of that great Whole by virtue of which he 
and we alone exist, this is the task for us. 
The light of such a recognition already 
lightens the world's darkness in many 
places where the spirit of brotherhood and 
true philanthropy is seeking to redeem 
the lost; but curiously enough many a 
woman who devotes much of her time to 
benevolent work for the outcast and de- 
graded will find it quite impossible to be 
on friendly terms with her neighbor who is 
in a different social set, or to bow to her 
grocer when she meets him in the street. 
Here, as in a picture, the subtle, difficult 
points of adjustment lie on the edges, at 
the joining of the masses. We can help 
the very poor and degraded with a long 
arm because they are clearly differentiated 
from us, but when the persons to be recog- 
nized are placed so nearly like us that they 

155 



may have the impertinence to think them- 
selves as good as, or even better than we, 
all sorts of difficulties arise to hinder our 
mutual recognition. 

If we examine a picture by Titian, or by 
any great artist who like him loved broad 
simple masses and clear distinctions of light 
and shade, we shall find that planes of light, 
such as are formed by a woman's neck or 
forehead, are painted for the most part flat 
and without modeling; while all the delicate 
shading whereby one plane is made to turn 
into the next, with a swelling curve at one 
point and a receding sweep at another, is 
to be found on the narrow edge where the 
planes come into contact. Here infinite 
labor has been expended, but not of a kind 
to strike the eye, until one studies the mat- 
ter carefully to discover by what magic 
these planes, so sharply contrasted in them- 
selves, have been united to form a rounded 
and beautiful whole. Surely then we are 
not wasting time and effort when we use 
all our tact and sympathy to find out just 
how, at one point by concession and at 
another by rightful dominance, we can 
unite the various classes of society into a 
spherical whole. But we must do this in 
the spirit of personal sacrifice. Our many 
theories on the subject will have small result 

156 ^ 



until we take to our hearts one obvious 
lesson of the law of the whole, namely, 
that all differences exist as a ground for 
union and not for separation. It is what 
we can contribute, and not what we can 
fence off, that should occupy our thoughts. 

When some burning question of re- 
ligion, politics, or sociology arrays people 
on different sides, how hard it is for us to 
realize that the whole, the final truth, must 
of necessity include our opponent's point 
of view as well as our own! Doubtless 
the final right will be more with one than 
the other, but it will in some way include 
both sides, so that neither can afford to 
ignore or despise the other. If we always 
realized this, we should maintain the true 
personal relation at all costs, as the only 
living basis ; and we should regard another's 
point of view as an essential contribution 
to that whole of truth, that wise conclu- 
sion, which we are endeavoring to reach. 
Our differences would be kept in the intel- 
lectual realm where they belong, and our 
happy personal relations would go on un- 
disturbed, made more beautiful even, by 
our recognition of the other person's point 
of view. 

There is much rebellion now against the 
personal element in authority, as is shown 

157 



by the increasing unwillingness on the part 
of young women of character and ability 
to enter domestic service. Yet it is through 
our personality that we hold our only real 
influence. Except as we use it in our re- 
lations to others, we affect them no more 
than a statue does; in fact, we probably 
affect them less, for the statue carries with 
it always the appeal of the artist who made 
it, thousands of years ago perhaps, for re- 
cognition of his thought of beauty, and 
this appeal is very pathetic and engaging. 
The Spirit of the whole gives us no right 
to domineer over others, but it lays on us 
the sacred responsibility of using our per- 
sonality to guide and direct those who are 
set under us in the organization of society. 
We are ganglia, as it were, whose business 
it is to communicate the central control to 
sub-departments. It is therefore not only 
inevitable, but much to be desired, that the 
power as we transmit it should be shaped 
by our personal quality; since personality 
or wholeness^ is the compacting force, the 
source of all expression and beauty. Its 
deepest law, as we have seen, is that the 
larger manifestations of it must beneficently 
control the lesser ones, and all social theories 
which leave this necessity out of account 
are fallacious. 

158 



The compensating truth is found in re- 
cognition. All assertions of personal author- 
ity are tolerable only when accompanied 
by the fullest recognition of relations both 
above and below the person who seeks to 
control the actions of others. He who 
would rule wisely must recognize the per- 
sonal claims of his subjects and must also 
see himself as the subject of a higher power. 

It is by a better understanding both of 
personality and recognition, and by a right 
adjustment of their relations to one another 
that we shall find the panacea for our social 
ills. Personality is developed by recogni- 
tion, and rightly demands recognition for 
itself; yet, as we have just said, there is an 
increasing unwillingness to recognize its 
authority. Is not this because we have not 
yet had an adequate idea of what true per- 
sonality is ? We have limited our thought 
of it to its human and most faulty embodi- 
ments, instead of seeing in it the living 
Spirit of the whole, never to be com- 
pletely understood except in view of that 
whole, and yet imparting to man what 
little authority and influence he wields, 
and manifesting itself also in some degree 
wherever there is anything that can be 
called an organization of related parts. If 
we looked at it in this large way we should 

IS9 



escape many difficulties that beset our 
merely human version of the personal idea. 
A child in the public schools will have 
great reverence for the power which con- 
strains him, and the rest of the tumultuous 
crew, into some orderly fashion of going 
down the stairs and leaving the building 
after school is over, when he might rebel 
vigorously against the orders of some spe- 
cial teacher. Here it is personality that 
constrains him ; not the perhaps capricious 
personality of a single individual, but a 
personality consisting of a unity of the re- 
lated customs that have been established 
for school management by the associated 
wisdom and experience of many. It is 
the same with an army. The unseen per- 
sonality of the discipline of the whole is so 
real a thing, and allegiance to it is so genu- 
ine an enthusiasm, that even a blundering 
order given by one of its most imperfect 
representatives, as at Balaclava, becomes 
transfigured into a trumpet-call for a host 
of martyrs. 

We might take a hint from these facts 
and learn that the more we can give to our 
personal authority the great qualities of 
the World-personality the more willingly 
will people yield obedience to it. We may 
think at first that the way to achieve this 
i6o 



is to put on a show of grandeur and of 
power to compel, but experience is show- 
ing us every day that such self-assertion 
tends to rouse the enmity of those we are 
set to govern, and to increase their discon- 
tent. No, the true way to identify our- 
selves with the World-personality and 
claim its sanction, the inner way, the way 
of the Spirit, is to look upward with awe, 
to make ourselves of no reputation, to see 
ourselves but as servants ; and because we 
hold our personality as dependent on the 
greatest Whole of all for its very exist- 
ence, to assume all positions of responsi- 
bility with humility and in the fear of God. 
It is only against an arbitrary use of per- 
sonal power that people rebel. The right 
use of it is an essential factor in all civili- 
zation and progress, and when we exercise 
our authority quietly and with true sym- 
pathy, the many who have no ability to 
direct the great affairs of state, or even to 
guide themselves aright, will rest gladly on 
our larger wisdom. 

If we can by our bearing make it ap- 
parent to every one with whom we come 
in contact, as they render us even the 
humblest service, diat it is a pleasure for 
us to speak to them simply because both 
they and we are human, it will do much 
i6i 



to arrest social revolution. No more beau- 
tiful tribute was ever paid to man than 
Lowell's lines on Agassiz : — 

*' No beggar ever felt him condescend. 

No prince presume : for still himself he bare 
At manhood's simple level, and w^here'er 
He met a stranger, there he left a friend." 

Recognition of the personality of our 
dependents in no way impairs our author- 
ity over them, but on the contrary it fills 
them with a spirit of helpfulness because 
by it we let them see that the service they 
do for us has, through us, a bearing on 
higher issues than either they or we are 
capable of controlling by ourselves. A 
maid may rebel against thorough dusting 
as a matter of daily routine, or she may 
think that insistence on punctuality is quite 
needless. If, however, she can be made to 
see that her employers are under authority 
as well as she, and that their lives of strenu- 
ous service are seriously hindered by dusty 
tools and unpunctual meals, then her per- 
sonality will rise to meet the demands of 
theirs, while her daily labor gains an out- 
look that does much to relieve its tedium. 

No one knows until he has tried it what 

joy and refreshment flow into life when 

channels are opened by recognition in every 

direction. Life does not inhere in us and 

162 



love does not. They are both mutual things 
and come into being when the right condi- 
tions are afforded. The great problem for 
us all is to get out of this hard shell of self- 
hood into which we were born, and whose 
outlets ignorance and prejudice so often 
clog. Our best strokes for freedom lie in 
infinite recognition of human beings, above, 
around, beneath us, of the birds and ani- 
mals, of the trees and flowers, and of each 
new day, for even that has its personal 
quality. And we need not fear that such 
broad recognition will get us into unfor- 
tunate social complications, for while all 
relations are included in the whole, and 
have therefore some connection with each 
other, yet the closeness of this connection 
varies infinitely. We should open our 
minds to all possibilities of relation and be 
ready to recognize all individualities no 
matter how different from our own, for only 
in this way can we truly acknowledge the 
whole ; but while by such recognition we 
shall find an immensely greater number 
of sympathetic relations than we had ex- 
pected, we shall also find that there are 
some persons with whom our contact can 
be but the slightest. Such differences in 
sympathy, being founded in the nature of 
things, may be trusted to take care of them- 
163 



selves. If any person's society is embar- 
rassing to us, ours is probably equally so to 
him. It is no kindness to an ignorant or 
ill-bred person to invite him to a dinner- 
party. Distinctions must and will forever 
exist ; there could be no expressive life 
without them. Our business is only to 
see that we do not make unnecessary dis- 
tinctions of our own, but pass through life 
with quiet, friendly recognition on every 
hand, and trust the shaping power that lies 
behind all the life of humanity to guide 
us, as it surely will, into the most perfect 
social adjustments. 

It is wonderful how our sense of spirit- 
ual substance grows as we yield ourselves 
to the opposite right, no matter in whom 
it may be embodied. We do it blindly 
at first, stepping off into the unseen, but 
quickly we feel the solid ground beneath 
our feet, and we have an assurance of reality 
that could never be ours in our isolated 
position. Instead of guarding our outposts 
and defending our individuality fi:om all 
comers, we find ourselves upheld by the re- 
cognition, consideration, love, and thought 
of other people, so that we are at once sus- 
tained and set free as never before. 

Marriage is the profoundest of all recog- 
nitions possible to man save that between 
164 



the soul and God. In it we find the two 
who make the one in their highest visible 
embodiment. In marriage also the spirit- 
ual and material are mysteriously blended, 
and the more spiritually the relation is con- 
ceived the clearer it becomes that two, and 
only two, can properly be concerned in it. 
Through the rightful union of a pair is 
wrought out the complete expression of 
marriage, the idea of the family. In this 
father, mother, and children all have their 
adjusted relations. The parents form the 
main contrast, and the blending of their 
opposite but profoundly related qualities 
appears in the individualities of the differ- 
ent children, and all unite to form the most 
beautiful whole on earth, and the most God- 
like, because in it man and woman have 
equal parts. 

Our personality, as was shown in a pre- 
vious chapter, is born of the relation be- 
tween ourselves and our environment, but 
in the development of this personality we 
do not always act on the basis of our com- 
plete individuality. We are made up of 
two elements, roughly speaking, and as 
one of them preponderates over the other, 
we are disposed to act chiefly from that 
side of our nature and hence to develop 
that at the expense of the other side. Of 

165 



course our strong natural bias indicates the 
line of our best achievement, yet since a 
whole must always be made out of oppo- 
sites, our natural talents and excellences 
will stand out much more brilliantly if we 
pay due attention to the opposite and con- 
trasting quahties. The artist knows that 
if he would paint luminous red or yellow 
he must begin with greens and violet grays; 
not making these chief, but giving them a 
considerable place on his canvas in order 
that they may enhance the effect of the 
brighter colors. The less evenly balanced 
a person's original make-up may be, the 
more essential it is that he should put his 
main effort into recognizing and bringing 
out his sub-quality ; just because the main 
quality can take care of itself, whereas the 
sub-quality stands in danger of being sup- 
pressed or overgrown. Recognition of 
one's sub-quality requires faith, and costs 
struggle, but it pays in the end. If we 
are strong on the side of truth and weak 
on the side of love, we gain enormously 
by entering into all sorts of helpful rela- 
tions with others, and by giving away, 
even with a wrench, our most valued pos- 
sessions. Hard-fisted, penurious money- 
getters have been transformed into great 
public benefactors by this determined re- 
i66 



cognition of a side of themselves that was 
not at first in evidence, but was really a 
part of them or they could not have been 
made to perceive its value. Character is 
woven between the two elements of a man's 
nature as they act and react on each other, 
and the man himself may stand between 
them and even fling the shuttle as specta- 
tor and helper of the process. A person 
who thus tries to see himself whole and 
give his entire being a chance, is in no 
danger of furnishing relays of selves to be 
experimented on by the hypnotist. 

It may be objected that to think about 
oneself and to plan for one's own devel- 
opment so deliberately is morbid, and that 
we should avoid such introspection. But 
since it is the will and not the intellect 
that is chiefly concerned in the recognition 
we speak of, we escape this danger. Be- 
cause the habitual recognition of our weaker 
side involves a constant letting go and 
renunciation of our instinctive preferences, 
it must surely tend to soften and enlarge 
our natures. 

We are all conscious of a set of possi- 
bilities within us that if encouraged might 
make us quite different from what we in- 
stinctively are, and the extent to which we 
should recognize these possibilities is a 
167 



serious question for every thoughtful per- 
son. One may find oneself capable of 
doing effective work by narrowing one's 
effort and concentrating in the direction 
indicated by one's predominating taste, but 
a suspicion creeps in, that because some 
departments of life are being neglected, 
work done on a basis narrower than that 
of which the person is capable will par- 
take of that narrowness and be less valuable 
in quality, though perhaps more abundant 
in quantity, than if the other side of life 
were recognized. 

Ethically the contest is usually between 
the individual need for development and 
the sympathetic qualities, and much bitter 
struggle ensues. Many a girl to-day is 
tempted to think that her desire for de- 
velopment is a snare, because it seems to 
make her heartless towards her relatives. 
She may abandon her art or her music and 
try to forget it, but because it is an inte- 
grant part of her it will not let itself be 
forgotten ; and the effort to suppress it will 
get her whole being out of order and wreak 
itself in future pain as all suppressed life 
does. She may take the other tack, stifle 
her heart and work on alone. Later the 
heart will take vengeance and cripple her 
hand. The only safe course is to recog- 
i68 



nize both elements of one's being ; see life 
whole ; and while accepting infinite post- 
ponement, if necessary, in the carrying out 
of individual desires, still to believe in and 
hold fast to those desires as part of the 
soul. They constitute a divine guidance, 
never to be selfishly followed, it is true, 
but also never to be lost sight of, never 
regarded as a mistake or cruelty, a gift 
meant only to bring torture to its possessor. 
In the adjustment of the two elements 
of life lies some of its most searching dis- 
cipline. The proportions prescribed for 
us by the whole may be very different 
from those of our first imaginings; but 
when we accept them, we find, like the 
artist, a true pleasure in limitation. We 
learn, like him, the value of backgrounds. 
The beginner in art sees chiefly the fore- 
ground objects. He is attracted by their 
graces of form and splendors of color, and 
longs to handle these enchanting materials 
for their own sake. He makes riotous use 
of them at first, and by degrees alone does 
he learn that their living beauty can be set 
forth only by a wise restraint, and by giv- 
ing due attention to the quiet lines and 
sober background tints fi^om which they 
detach themselves. When we know just 
how much of our life is rightly ours to 
169 



carry out our own ideas in, our conscience 
being set free by habitual recognition of 
the claims of others, then in that little 
space, be it only an hour a day, we can 
work wonders. What we do within these 
limits will have a fineness that we could 
not attain in any other way, and a convin- 
cing rightness, because, as in the case of the 
white dress alluded to in an earlier chap- 
ter, we shall not be using tints that belong 
to other parts of the picture. 

The effort to see life whole may at first 
produce perplexing characters. Until the 
opposing qualities in any person find their 
right mutual adjustment he is likely to act 
sometimes from one side of his nature and 
sometimes from the other and so lay him- 
self open to the charge of inconsistency. 
But if his aim be right there will be a large 
unity underlying his contradictions, and 
his faith in that unity will finally bring him 
out on to a firm and consistent basis. His 
main quality will still be controlling, but 
it will be inspired, vitalized, regulated, and 
set in right relation to life by his sub-qual- 
ity. His touch on men and things may 
at first be uncertain, lacking in tact and 
firmness, but if the inner relation be fully 
recognized it will at last refine him down 
to his finger tips. In short we shall see a 
170 



person where before there was only an in- 
dividual, because recognizing the other 
element in oneself always tends to bring 
one into truer and more useful relation to 
one's fellows, both being included in our 
complete relation to God. 

The cross, that is, the two elements or 
currents of being crossing and apparently 
at war with each other, is thus the condi- 
tion of every human life. We live at the 
point of intersection, and are free to throw 
our influence in the direction of either cur- 
rent as we please. If our deeds are par- 
tial, following one current overmuch, the 
other current avenges itself and circum- 
stances oblige us to take back those deeds 
or do them over, and by this inevitable 
wash and counterwash of tendencies the 
interests of humanity in general are served. 
Yet the problem lies deeper than this. It 
is to secure not only wise action, but also 
more life in those who act. If the two cur- 
rents can be harmonized before the deed, 
that is, in our spirits, we gain infinitely, 
not only in wisdom but in health. 

It is evident that the whole must have 
a guidance for us as we face the confus- 
ing possibilities that life offers, because the 
final cause of everything is to be found 
only in the largest whole of which it forms 
171 



a part. The problem is to find this guid- 
ance. We meet the universal at every 
moment of our life. It confronts us in 
every phase of the world of men and 
things. We cannot breathe without enter- 
ing into some relation with it ; but if we 
would have guidance in our choices to 
help us find the right and developing re- 
lations among the many possible wrong 
and dwarfing ones, then we must think of 
the whole as something more than vague 
and immanent, it must become to us de- 
finite and personal. So long as we con- 
ceive it only as vague and immanent, our 
morality as well as our science becomes 
empirical, we choose what we please and 
take the consequences. But we long for 
something much better than this, we sigh 
for some constraint towards the best, some 
encouragement to be faithful, some pro- 
mise that though we see only the rough 
ends on our side of the tapestry of life, yet 
a beautiful pattern is being woven on the 
other side, whose wide and lovely mean- 
ing will some day make us rejoice that we 
were counted worthy to carry even one of 
its dullest threads. Such encouragement 
can come to us only through a direct re- 
lation with the greatest Whole of all. 
As a child advances in life he enters 
172 



progressively into larger and larger rela- 
tions. At first he is only related to his 
family ; later he becomes perhaps a mem- 
ber of a school which moulds his mind and 
character, while he in return influences the 
school in some small degree. The time 
of tutelage past, he begins to recognize the 
claims of still larger wholes, such as the 
city in which he dwells or the country 
that claims him as her son. These larger 
wholes may break up his home life by 
their stern demands. War, or some need 
for patriotic service may lead him to give 
up, or wholly subordinate, the things that 
are naturally most dear to him ; yet de- 
spite this giving up he is conscious that 
his only real tenure of the things ceded 
lies in his faithfulness to the highest duty 
that he knows of He deserves them only 
by yielding them. He feels instinctively 
that the ideal wholeness of his life must 
be preserved even at the cost of some of 
its dearest embodiments. He must pre- 
serve the right relation of things to each 
other, even if he apparently lose the things 
themselves. 

** Though love repine, and reason chafe. 
There comes a voice without reply, — 
'T is man's perdition to be safe 
When for the truth he ought to die.'* 



He who obeys this inner voice is surely 
living the life of the Spirit, though he may 
never call it by that name. 

Thus every whole controls the lesser 
wholes or parts within it. This is the uni- 
versal law, and therefore nothing can have 
permanent existence, no relation can be 
safe from disruption, except such as are 
established in right relation to the great- 
est Whole of all. No human being can, 
from the nature of things, see this whole 
for himself; yet equally from the nature of 
things no deed can be rightly done except 
in view of this whole. This is scientifi- 
cally as well as religiously true, and in 
these to all appearance contradictory con- 
ditions lies man's eternal need for faith. 
If he could attain his relation to the great 
whole only by a gradual succession of 
steps, as in this life he mounts the rungs 
of the political ladder, or in the practice of 
his profession attains one eminence after 
another, it would seem a hopeless task for 
him ever to come into right relation with 
that greatest Whole of all that we know 
as God. The distance would seem too 
great to be surmounted. But just because 
that greatest Whole is an ideal whole ; be- 
cause wholeness is its very essence, it un- 
derlies all other wholes, its Spirit permeates 

174 



the entire fabric of things and has its seat 
in man's most inward part. He need not 
travel one step to find it. Its home is in 
his breast, he has only to recognize it and 
its guidance becomes his forevermore. 

In spirit man can truly identify himself 
with the whole. His attitude towards it 
should be one of passionate receptivity, 
and this is quite possible though it may 
sound like a contradiction in terms to 
those whose only idea of passion is that of 
greedy appropriation or ruthless self-utter- 
ance. Acceptance would at first seem to 
paralyze energy, but it is entirely possible 
to make acceptance merely the channel 
through which a higher energy may flow. 
Man's first conscious recognition of the 
whole opens for him channels to the in- 
finite and his life rearranges itself on a new 
basis. Perhaps if he has lived in great 
error, all the masses of his picture will 
have to be reconstructed ; or perhaps if he 
has been doing his best to lead a moral 
and helpful life without this higher recog- 
nition, the result of introducing a more 
brilliant note of light than his picture was 
originally keyed to will be, not to re- 
arrange the former values, but only to 
make them look exceedingly dingy. 

The great point is that this recognition, 

175 



like all other recognitions that are worth 
anything, must be a personal recognition 
involving not only the intellect but the will. 
We cannot say this too many times. No- 
thing less central than this can avail us, for 
as we have seen, the law of the whole works 
through the centres of things rather than 
through their circumferences. It is this 
intimate personal demand that lends such 
a mystical quality to our relations with the 
greatest Whole. Its Spirit storms the in- 
most citadel of a man's being, and before 
that will yield the whole selfhood of the 
man will rise to do battle. There is a hard 
spot in the centre of each of us that needs 
to be exorcised, a knot that must be un- 
tied before the Spirit of the whole, which 
is the Spirit of life, can find there its right- 
ful lodgment and flow outward in moral 
and physical harmony. 

The perceptions opened to us by our 
recognition of the whole will of course be 
much confused and obstructed at first by 
our mental limitations. Our wisdom will 
be far from perfect, but because it is of the 
right kind it must and will develop and 
clear itself of impurities until it leads us 
into all truth. We shall have eternity in 
which to find out how great the whole is, 
and an increasing perception of this will 
176 



doubtless reconstruct us a good many times; 
but such reconstruction, even though it 
mean physical death, cannot be painful in 
more than a momentary sense, because it 
will be in harmony with our deepest life 
and most fervent desire. Little as we are, 
we can yet here and now genuinely pledge 
ourselves to the whole, whatever it may 
prove to be, and so save our lives from that 
hopelessly narrow and provincial quality 
that must result from their being anchored 
in anything of lesser scope. Until we do 
this we are " off centre " spiritually, and our 
motion cannot be steady and harmonious. 

What evidence have we that the Whole 
stands in an attitude of personal recogni- 
tion towards us ? 

Practically the personal means to us the 
responsive, the recognizing. A personal 
relation between us and another human be- 
ing implies that our differing individuali- 
ties suit each other, and seem to be the com- 
plements of each other in some special way. 
Many persons attract us at only one point, 
others affect us sympathetically all round. 
It may be because of likeness, it may be 
because of difference; we may be either 
the chief giver or the chief receiver in the 
interchange ; just what the relation is does 
not matter, the point is that in some way 
177 



we suit and help and please each other. 
Moreover, it may be noted that the closest 
and most personal relations, like that of 
marriage, are the most exclusive. The per- 
sonality that we accept in this deep way 
must be one attuned to us in so special a 
manner that we brook no rival in our re- 
lations with it and cannot conceive of its 
being equally adapted to any other indi- 
viduality than ours. 

The two elements of the whole might 
be supposed to stand forever in a perfect 
balance if it were not that the individual 
element from its essential nature tends to 
set the universal in motion, and by destroy- 
ing its equilibrium to rouse it to expres- 
sion. When we think of God as the uni- 
versal alone, He is not a person to us and 
stands in no relation of love or help to- 
wards us ; but when we admit the individ- 
ual element as in the nature of things co- 
existent with the universal, and think of 
that individual element as reaching out 
and thereby breaking up the balance and 
motionless calm of the universal, we touch 
at once a personal possibility. If the great- 
est Whole of all, infinite, beyond our power 
of thought, is also so far individual that it 
has reached forth to express itself by cre- 
ating even the smallest thing (the wing of 

178 



a fly would be enough), then by that act 
its equilibrium is destroyed and that ele- 
ment of mutual dependence is introduced 
which thrills our humanity with a feeling 
of common need. The whole is no longer 
complete without that tiny part which it 
has projected from itself, and thus a rela- 
tion of dependence is established between 
the two, and a perfectly definite relation 
that is no less than personal. Because that 
little wing has taken away just so much 
from all the rest, all the rest feels the loss 
and is different because of it, while at the 
same time the little wing is helpless unless 
it can find some reason for its existence 
through its relation to the great whole 
from which it has emerged but of which 
it still ideally forms a part. 

Each of us is a point of consciousness 
projected fi"om the whole, and no two per- 
sons occupy the same point. The universe 
is made up to every man's consciousness 
of himself and all the rest. All the rest 
means our environment of material things 
and behind all, beyond all, God, somewhat 
vaguely realized. Man used to conceive 
of God as enthroned somewhere outside of 
his world, because the ordinary notion of a 
person, derived from the external form of 
man, limits him to one place at a time. 
179 



But if with the help of our more intelli- 
gent modern imagination we think of God 
as himself the Whole, made up of us and 
of all the rest, then we can see that we and 
all the rest stand in a relation to Him as the 
centre which is most vital and compelling, 
and from which we cannot escape ; a rela- 
tion binding us and all the rest together in 
a perfect unity which would be impossible 
without both us and all the rest. More- 
over, since no two of us occupy the same 
point of consciousness, all the rest must 
mean a slightly different thing to each one 
of us. Therefore the relation between us 
and all the rest being special, individual, 
and not to be duplicated, fulfills perfectly 
the definition of a personal relation. 

Of course our appreciation of this and 
the comfort we get out of it will depend 
on our recognition of all the rest. This 
recognition will be personal, joyful, and 
love-revealing in proportion as we con- 
ceive of all the rest from the side of the 
Whole, which is God. We are apt to con- 
ceive it from the side of the details. We 
study the details first and then try in vain to 
construct a whole from them. The right 
way is to assume the whole and then try 
to see all details in the light of it. The 
artist will tell us that the latter is the only 
i8o 



constructive method, the only way in which 
a work of art can possibly be created. It 
is hard for us to escape being controlled by 
details, because our daily life is a continu- 
ous dealing with them ; but we know that 
in confronting any practical problem the 
most important thing for us is to learn 
which the details are, so that we can sub- 
ordinate them and handle them fearlessly. 
There is always some major contrast which 
will control all other elements and bring 
them into harmony if we can but find it ; 
but we sometimes spend a whole lifetime 
in discovering what this major contrast is, 
so great is the power of details to divert 
attention to themselves. We tend to begin 
our portraits by painting the eyelashes 
rather than the main masses of head and 
figure. The controlling relations can be 
discovered by us in any problem, but only 
by looking at it from a distance, and with 
a certain aloofiiess and withdrawal of per- 
sonal prejudice. 

It may be suggested in passing that the 
mutual relation of the whole and the parts 
explains something of the puzzling coex- 
istence of the equal truths of freedom and 
determinism. Anything in the world is 
capable of being made a pivot or centre 
around which other things shall revolve. 
i8i 



So far man is free. Unimportant details 
may be exalted into pivots by human re- 
cognition. This is continually done, as 
when a man unduly magnifies his own im- 
portance through self-esteem, or devotes 
himself to pleasure or private business to 
the exclusion of larger interests, or — and 
this is the worst of all — when having com- 
mitted a wrong act he identifies himself 
with it by refusing to admit that it was a 
mistake, and thus makes of his mistake a 
centre of power around which he revolves. 
Insanity lies that way. A continual con- 
straint is brought to bear upon us from the 
greatest Whole to make the largest rela- 
tions of all the controlling ones, because 
these alone are permanent. Accepting 
these relations, man has, like the artist, 
infinite freedom within limitations — the 
limitations themselves being but the essen- 
tial conditions of his personality — and 
thus his freedom and the higher law are 
brought into harmony. Until he accepts 
his limitations he is free to revolve around 
as many minor pivots as he pleases, such 
as appetite, fashion, money-getting, popu- 
larity, or even narrowly-conceived reform, 
but with the result that by so doing he 
brings disorder into his own life and the 
lives of others. Such perverse eddies and 
182 



whirlpools quickly subside, however, when 
a man heartily trusts himself to the main 
current. 

The complete personal recognition by 
which man becomes consciously united 
to God must be a separate experience for 
each human soul, but proofs are not want- 
ing that God's anticipatory recognition of 
us is one of the most potent factors in the 
development of life. We see an analogous 
influence at work upon the brute creation 
through their relation to man, who is their 
god. While at first certain colorings and 
habits may have been advantageous to birds 
and animals by concealing and thus pro- 
tecting their bodies from destruction by 
man, yet as soon as we reach the higher 
grades of animal life, such qualities as in- 
telligence and responsiveness, which draw 
the creatures towards man instead of con- 
cealing them from him, are the ones which 
make the strongest appeal; and man's recog- 
nition of these qualities and of all the pos- 
sibilities that they imply in the way of com- 
panionship and service, as in the dog, the 
cat, and the horse, becomes one of the chief 
factors in the higher development of these 
creatures. There is doubtless a point in 
the experience of every domesticated ani- 
mal when after some struggle he exchanges 

183 



his natural distrust of man for a confidence 
in and adoration of him, when, in short, he 
is tamed. After this point is passed his 
master can do anything with him. Even 
so, as man's eyes are lifted to the highest re- 
cognition of which he is capable, a power 
from above meets him in that recognition 
and develops his higher faculties with un- 
expected speed. Even before he learns 
to look above, the divine recognition with 
its thrilling demand meets him at every 
turn and calls to him from everything with 
which he comes in contact, though he per- 
sistently misunderstands and turns away 
from it. 

Much of the activity of human life lies 
in the joyous self-expression of man through 
things that he creates for use or beauty. 
Those made for use imply a clear recog- 
nition of others and their needs, and every 
expression in verse or picture is really an 
appeal for sympathy. It can be shown 
that a certain incompleteness which char- 
acterizes the most charming art is but a 
plea for the supplementing of itself by the 
beholder. Now if every whole that man 
creates, every expression of his personality, 
is implicitly an appeal for recognition, may 
we not believe that the great Whole which 
has brought us into being stands in a per- 
184 



sonal relation to us ; that is, not merely a 
structural relation, but one which makes a 
supreme appeal to each one of us for re- 
cognition of itself? It sometimes seems 
as if the passion of this appeal from the 
central heart of fire were enough to con- 
stitute both the inner and outer worlds; 
maintaining the inner world of love by its 
mighty though invisible attraction of all 
things to itself, and the external world of 
truth by its demand that all men and things 
should be recognized of each other. 

A certain sort of recognition of the 
whole is by no means rare in these days. 
Science and sociology both impress it upon 
us, and thereby much is gained. Modem 
ethical teaching has developed a morality 
that may almost be called enthusiastic, yet 
it lacks the final touch that shall kindle it 
to an undying flame. Even such a vision 
of the whole as man has drawn from these 
human sources has given him a strength 
beyond his own. It has helped many 
when their lives were bruised and broken 
to escape from their limitations and find 
themselves again in the freedom of some 
larger whole of public service or heroic 
enterprise ; but such experience, despite its 
dignity and fortitude, falls short of that 
illuminating joy which is the birthright 

185 



of every child of God. Humanity, at its 
best, gives but a diffused, often a tardy and 
grudging recognition, to those who die for 
it. The burden of responsibility for our 
acts in their relation to a vague humanity 
is already more than we can bear, and 
threatens to grow heavier day by day as 
the world's life grows more complicated. 
We shall surely die of details unless our 
conflicting duties can be fused into some 
personal allegiance. Even Mr. Adler, the 
great apostle of ethical culture, appreciates 
this need, and says that with the passing 
of the belief in a personal God "men's 
lives have become flexible and dry because 
their ideals have gone." He proposes the 
state for our object of worship, saying, 
'^Let politics take the place of religion. 
If we care nothing for kings let us devote 
ourselves to the State. In the State let us 
find the personal deity which is passing out 
of men's lives. Let the State be the ob- 
ject of our worship. Let us make it sacred, 
and when we have done so the State will 
have taken the place of the personification. 
Let the State be that personification." But 
is it possible for us to raise the state, which 
we ourselves make, and make very poorly, 
into an object of enthusiastic worship, to 
"make it sacred," as Mr. Adler recom- 
i86 



mends? No, we are to-day hungering, 
thirsting, shriveling, in our need for an ob- 
ject of adoration which we have not made 
and never can make ; our life is parched 
because we dare not trust ourselves to that 
returning wave, that current of divine love 
and recognition, which flows down to us 
from the highest to console, to strengthen 
and to renew. Whether he knows it or 
not, the supreme passion of man's soul is 
his passion for God. Until that is satisfied 
he wanders orphaned and forlorn. 

Charles Reade says somewhere that 
"Heaven promises us a thousand affec- 
tions but not one single passion," and this 
pallid conception, but a little less blood- 
less than the classic idea of a world of 
shades, is indeed all that we can raise our 
hopes to, until by casting ourselves upon 
the heart of God we learn that pure pas- 
sion is the essence of immortal life. Such 
divine passion is not fitful and subject to 
bitter reaction like its poor counterfeit here, 
but is a steady white heat of sustained and 
glorious life of which some faithful souls 
have had a foretaste even in this present 
world, and have known that it was con- 
ditioned upon that of which death itself 
could not rob them. 

We have much for which to thank 

187 



modem science in that it has brought the 
idea of the whole very close to us, even 
though in so doing it has threatened to 
deprive it of its personal quality. The 
tendency of that personal conception of 
God held by our fathers, which has sus- 
tained so many martyr spirits, was to post- 
pone all idea of man's escape out of his 
pains and limitations into the freedom of 
the whole, to a future life. Mrs. Stowe, 
when a young woman, writes to a friend, 
" Well, my dear, there is a land where we 
shall not love and leave. Those skies shall 
never cease to shine, the waters of life we 
shall never be called on to leave. We 
have here no continuing city, but we seek 
one to come. In such thoughts as these 
I desire ever to rest." The twentieth cen- 
tury ought to be able to combine this 
ancient attitude of trust with the modern 
understanding of the whole as immanent ; 
and realize that as the whole presses upon 
us through every physical atom at every 
moment of our lives, it is ever beseeching 
us for love and recognition of itself^ so that 
as we trust it and offer ourselves up to it 
in return, it becomes part of our conscious 
life here and now. Thus we shall unite 
our physical and spiritual lives in one, and 
break through the hard wall of separation 
i88 



between this world and the next. We shall 
" approximate our latter times by present 
apprehensions of them," as Sir Thomas 
Browne says, " and since there is something 
of us that will still live on, join both lives 
together, and live in one but for the other." 
Indeed k might be said that we shall live 
in one but by the other, for instead of look- 
ing forward to heaven as a long vacation 
reserved for the spent soul after a lifetime 
of overwork, we shall have an immediate 
and ever-present consciousness of it as of a 
spring of living water from which we may 
at all times draw supplies, a boundless ocean 
of love on which our. weary spirits may 
float and rest, a cloudless sun by which 
we may at any moment correct the dead 
reckoning of our daily course. 

Man must forever look upward with awe 
because the whole is so vast. Mr. Spen- 
cer is right in calling God the " Unknow- 
able," because we can never intellectually 
comprehend or include that which is greater 
than ourselves. We would not have it 
otherwise. We need a supreme Idea that 
can expand indefinitely with our mental 
growth, so that we need never fear coming 
to an end of it. Its principles, its life may 
be in our hearts, itself we would never see. 
We could not rest in, and lose ourselves 
189 



in, anything that we know as we know this 
poor humanity of ours. But God's great- 
ness is no bar to our inner relation with 
Him : the greater He is the more refresh- 
ment of contrast do we find when we turn 
from our choked and stifling lives to breathe 
the pure ether of the infinite spaces. The 
only essential point is that our kinship with 
God be proved beyond doubt or perad- 
venture, so that we may turn to instead of 
from Him, and may feel free to love and to 
adore. Mr. Spencer is surely wrong when 
he says that " we lack the faculty of fram- 
ing even the dimmest conception " of God's 
nature, for despite the contradictions that 
ofi:en threaten to hide God from us, nay, 
just because of those contradictions^ we be- 
lieve in Him. And this is no blind faith, 
for out of those contradictions the tissue 
of our own lives is woven ; to combine 
them into some personal expression of our 
thought is the most delightful occupation 
that we know ; so it is surely not too much 
to believe that through the personality 
which enables us to do this we are allied 
to that personal Whole in which all oppo- 
sites are reconciled, and which is at once 
the Supreme Self and the Supreme Unself 
The existence of a current of love stream- 
ing down to us from the Most High, as the 
190 



living truth of the world of relation, cannot 
be a matter of intellectual demonstration 
simply because it is the inward truth of 
things and reverses many of our merely 
intellectual perceptions. It seeks to turn 
a man right side out, as the sunlight woo- 
ing the heart of a rosebud bids it fling wide 
its close-folded petals in order that from 
their centre may emerge the seed of its 
continued life. In such reversing we have 
another instance of that interchangeable- 
ness of centre and circumference to which 
we have several times referred. The first 
spiritual need of man is to look up and 
away from himself Moses lifted up the 
serpent in the wilderness in order that the 
plague-stricken people might look away 
from their sufferings to it, and be healed. 
But, curiously enough, — so profoundly 
true is every phase of the symbolic drama 
of Israel's history — the object which Moses 
raised on high was a representation of the 
very instrument of the people's immediate 
torture. When they roused themselves 
enough to look up to it — to see their suf- 
fering as outside of themselves — the an- 
guish passed from them and they became 
clean within. So it is with the human 
soul. At first to look within means an in- 
crease of self-consciousness and a turning 
191 



away from the source of light. Little is to 
be seen within but evil, for although the 
whole is the rightful Lord of man and has 
its proper seat within his breast, as yet it 
has not been recognized by him as such. 
When lifted up externally, as Moses lifted 
the serpent, the whole appears to man only 
as a reflection of his own torture and rouses 
in him only an aggravated sense of misery, 
until at last by his utterly trusting it, the 
miracle of transference is wrought, self is ex- 
orcised, and the Lord is enthroned within. 

Man shrinks at first from the whole as 
a maiden shrinks from her lover, because 
its approach reveals a depth in himself 
that he had not suspected ; but when it has 
been admitted into the inmost sanctuary 
of being, when the soul has accepted its 
largest relation as the controlling one, then 
circumference has changed to centre, and 
man lives consciously and joyously fi-om 
within, for in his Holy of Holies there 
is no longer self but God. 

A sense of the whole, personally con- 
ceived and trusted as all-wise, all-loving, 
and all-encompassing, will do wonders for 
us in many practical directions. A con- 
stant turning to it in spirit gives us the 
same refreshment and the same grasp of 
the true values and essential relations of 
192 



life that the artist gains by leaving his work 
and going out to get a " fresh eye " as he 
calls it. The whole has infinite power to 
free us from that awareness of ourselves 
which is the great hindrance to our success 
in every direction. It sometimes seems as 
if all we had to do was to get out of our 
own way in order to accomplish miracles 
of excellent work. It is of course hard to 
get out of our own way because we are the 
instruments through which the work must 
be done ; but one shrewdly suspects that in 
the last analysis the achievement is not ours 
at all, and that all that practice does for us 
is to remove our self-consciousness in the 
doing of any act, so as to give the whole 
a free chance to perform it through us. 
Our mental processes bear witness to the 
fact that all we have to do is to put our- 
selves in the right attitude in order to re- 
ceive and impart such truth as we are fitted 
to communicate. It is a common experi- 
ence that when a person impartially admits 
all the elements of any problem, and with 
an earnest desire to know the solution of it, 
sleeps or goes about his business, the result 
is often worked out for him as completely 
as if his mind had been a " penny-in-the- 
slot " machine. At any rate it is safe to 
say that he forms a better judgment by 

^93 



such means than if he fussed and worried 
over the subject. All the modern teaching 
of muscular relaxing has its reason in this 
principle of getting out of one's own way, 
but such teaching does not go deep enough 
to be of the most fundamental helpfulness. 
Relaxing at the very centre of our being is 
what we need, and in doing this our limbs 
and muscles are relaxed incidentally. 

The extent to which self-consciousness 
may interfere with the best work is plainly 
illustrated by the fact that the subsidiary 
characters in novels, particularly those writ- 
ten by a strong thinker, like George Eliot 
for instance, are often truer to nature than 
those upon which the author has expended 
much time and effort. Intellectual con- 
centration, except on the very highest 
truths, seems often to defeat its own ends. 
If we do a thing too hard — that is, out 
of proportion to the rest — we never do it 
successfully. A foot-ball team plays best 
when its members are primarily all-round 
athletes. 

The sense of the whole is common 
sense, — the wisdom that would be ours if 
all elements were taken in. It is fair play ; 
the right of others as well as our own. It 
is consolation ; sharing the success of others 
even when we ourselves fail. It is enthu- 
194 



siasm ; inspiring in the lover of his kind a 
steady vision of the unity he would in- 
culcate, rather than of the fragmentariness 
against which he wages battle. It is loy- 
alty, it is sobriety and self-restraint. It 
helps us to drop things where finished — 
they belong to the whole and not to us. 
It takes away impatience and anger be- 
cause we have always so much to interest 
us, so much to love and rejoice in, that no 
single injury or disappointment can grieve 
us beyond measure. 

Our relation to the whole seems mysti- 
cal simply because it demands of us some- 
thing beyond our ken. It is really the 
most natural of all relations, the only com- 
pletely natural one, because the only one 
which takes in all possible elements. We 
pass through a good deal that to us seems 
unnatural in attaining to this relation, be- 
cause in order to transcend our natural 
limitations we have to trust ourselves to 
the point of view of the whole as that 
point of view is shown to us by trial or 
disappointment, or possibly by some un- 
expected and seemingly monstrous demand 
on our powers. We feel unnatural when 
we try to act on these intimations, and not 
until our lives have been set over into the 
larger relation do we see that things really 

195 



could not have gone any other way. Such 
self-surrender is not cowardice. It is often 
the highest courage. No life, no character 
can be complete without it. Every part, 
whether man, woman, or nation even, must 
be willing, when the need arises, to give up 
and let itself be born again into the free- 
dom of a larger truth. Our relation to 
God is the most controlling simply because 
it is the largest and includes all others. 
When this relation is once recognized, 
light is thrown on all minor relations. The 
old-fashioned practice of " meditation," the 
" concentration " now so much advocated 
by certain schools of religious teachers, 
amounts simply to this, namely : a deliber- 
ate recognition for perhaps fifteen minutes 
daily, of our largest relation as the supreme 
one. This recognition tends to bring all 
the elements of our lives into place and 
to harmonize them, as the high light in a 
picture prescribes all the lesser lights and 
arranges them in a unity of effect. This 
brings a great calmness to us, but it is no 
nirvana. All our interests and desires are 
still present, and ready to spring into full 
activity. They are simply held in leash 
and brought into their proper relative po- 
sition. Our absorbing work, our joy, our 
sorrow, our grievance, our infirmity, all of 
196 



these are still with us, but no one of them 
is now overwhelming, because when com- 
pared with the whole the greatest of them 
is so infinitely trifling as to be of no real 
account. 

We do not arm ourselves against disease 
by denying its existence. It is doubt- 
less a real, though not a final, condition; 
but much justification for the exaggerated 
statement that there is no such thing as 
disease can be found in the fact that as 
illness temporarily beclouds our faculties 
and tends to depression of spirits, we need 
the strongest statement of which language 
is capable to enable us to throw it off by 
showing us how small and temporary even 
our worst suffering is when compared to 
that sunny wholeness of perfect life of 
which we are ideally a part. When we 
say that we have " got bronchitis " for in- 
stance, what we really mean is often that 
bronchitis has got us. Thus we take a 
negative attitude towards it, and by such at- 
titude invite it to do its worst, making it a 
centre round which our thoughts revolve. 
If instead of this we relegate the trouble 
to its proper place, as a mere eddy in the 
stream of health, we can make light of it 
and do much to drive it out. To go fur- 
ther than this, and wilfully deny the ex- 
197 



istence of disease in the face of obvious 
facts, is often to fight it negatively and so 
give it encouragement. One sometimes 
sees portraits in which the artist, in his de- 
sire to concentrate everything on the figure, 
has sHghted the background and painted 
it in coarse masses of meaningless color. 
The effect is precisely opposite to the one 
that was intended. The slighted back- 
ground calls attention to itself by its lack 
of subtlety and detracts firom the main 
figure. 

Most of us believe in God, and we have 
enough conception of his divine wholeness 
to keep us from gross sin ; but we fail of 
getting the daily wisdom that might be 
ours, because we do not take the right steps 
to secure it, just as completely as we fail 
to run an engine when we refuse to get up 
steam in the boiler. One case is as practi- 
cal as the other. The divine Spirit which 
regulates life and makes it joyful will not 
force its way into us unless we give it a 
chance. Are we willing to take fifteen 
minutes out of the best part of our day, 
and, entering the temple of white light 
within us, hold at bay all our cares and 
fears, our pleasures and responsibilities, un- 
til they sink into quietness and leave us 
alone with God ? Are we willing to stay 
198 



the current of individual activity which is 
bearing us along until we can admit the 
possibility of a different line of action? 
This is the true cross. It will avail us little 
if we do this at the odd moments, or the 
sleepy ones. It demands our best. When 
with energy and enthusiasm we are setting 
about our most delightful task, then is the 
moment to turn the full current of en- 
deavor heavenward, to hold open the inner 
gate of the soul, and let in the flood of 
revealing light. We lose no time by it, 
though a prince were kept waiting, for 
when our thoughts and loves have been 
set in order by an assertion of the true pro- 
portions of things, all that we do will gain 
greatly in wisdom; our health will im- 
prove, and we shall be saved fi'om false 
starts and the need for frequent apologies. 
Moreover, if we make this point in our 
lives every day, the influence of it will 
go with us and be something that we can 
quickly fly to as a refuge from the tur- 
moil around us. Life seems to grow con- 
stantly more bustling and noisy. The 
electric cars whiz and clang. Endless com- 
mittees, necessary business, and good works 
that cannot be gainsaid, hurry us from place 
to place, and all seems to go on at an in- 
creasing rate. We must have an inner 
199 



rhythm, larger and calmer than the outer, 
and abide in that, if we would have peace 
and save our nerves from shipwreck. Sure- 
ly in this direction lies our best hope for 
fighting the fearful increase of insanity. 

This " concentration " that we are advo- 
cating is really a vastation of self While 
it is a concentration of the attention, it is 
at the same time a relaxing of the volun- 
tary powers. It seems to reach, as nothing 
else does, that mysterious point where soul 
and body join. The effect of it can be 
felt physically in a pleasant tingling, as the 
tide of renewing force rushes in to refresh 
our strained nerves and recall them to a 
healthy balance. It is as if one standing 
on a beach and facing towards the forest 
in a painful effort to count every twig on 
every tree, were suddenly to turn round 
and fill his gaze with the vastness of the 
ocean, from its limitless horizon to the 
long, sliding, foam-edged curves at his feet, 
inhaling deep breaths of its ozone, and 
letting the breeze from its blue distance 
smooth the wrinkles from his forehead. 
And yet it is far more than this, for the 
ocean does not hold the secret of the forest 
twigs, whereas the whole contains for us 
the only true solution of all the puzzles 
we have been wearying our brains with 
200 



while we turned our backs to it. Opening 
our souls to the universal admits that cur- 
rent of right relation which is the secret of 
physical health as well as of mental sound- 
ness. It restores our bodily functions to har- 
monious activity and brings our conscious- 
ness back to that proper attitude towards 
men and things which we lose temporarily 
through prolonged and narrow individual 
exertion. 

Such an exercise as this strikes us at 
first as unattractive. We feel that if our 
hearts are set towards the good in a gen- 
eral way that is enough. Yet we fail to get 
many blessings that we desire. We need 
something more practical, and we are dis- 
covering in these days that there is a realm 
within us in which the Spirit of the whole 
can make itself appreciably felt by a re- 
versal of polarity if not by a molecular 
change. In order to effect this, however, 
adequate means must be used. No vague 
aspirations will suffice. The gate must be 
opened by us, and held open, or the life 
principle cannot flow in. It comes to us in 
full measure when we give it a fair chance, 
and it is on this truth that Mind Cure, Chris- 
tian Science, and other occult methods of 
healing are founded, and because they con- 
form to what may be called either a physi- 

20I 



cal law of the spirit, or a spiritual law of 
matter, they often achieve excellent results. 
Their practice is really the most prevail- 
ing form of prayer, because it starts with 
an overwhelming realization of boundless 
power and love whose influx man invites 
by an attitude of confident receptivity; 
whereas much of our ordinary petition is 
little more than a rehearsal of personal 
needs and desires, and as such, a magnify- 
ing of self and a shutting out of the very 
help that we invoke. We are always in- 
clined to pray that conditions may be 
altered, rather than to demand strength to 
meet them as they are. 

A suggestion of the reason why it is pos- 
sible to produce physical results by what 
may seem a purely spiritual exercise, may 
be found in the fact that the inflowing cur- 
rent of right relation is also the current 
of love, sympathy, and consideration for 
others. Now if it be true that wholeness 
is akin to personality, then the separate 
organs of the human body — wholes in 
themselves yet parts of the complete or- 
ganism — have so far a personal quality 
as to make what may be called a personal 
or human method of dealing with them en- 
tirely reasonable. It is certainly true that 
as the current of right relation is directed to 
202 



some organ — a weak stomach, perhaps — 
a perceptible stimulation results. The or- 
gan seems to be encouraged to fresh activity 
by the recognition of its importance to the 
welfare of the whole. Such sympathetic 
turning of the life force to the point where it 
is most needed is a much more wholesome 
form of stimulation than that produced by 
drugs which whip the already over-tired 
organ into further activity. There is all 
the difference between the two methods 
that there is between the behavior of half 
a dozen noisy, healthy, romping brothers 
who stop in their play to hold out a hand 
of help to their delicate little sister, and 
perhaps carry her on their shoulders for a 
while, and that of a less affectionate family 
who leave their weak sister at home in 
tears, or force her by threats to fetch and 
carry for them. Of course an organ may, 
on the other hand, be lazy and selfish, un- 
willing to do its proper work without arti- 
ficial stimulants. In such cases the current 
of right relation brings to bear upon it the 
tonic of a gentle compulsion. 

When we are anchored in the whole, and 
live from that serene and gracious realm, 
we move swiftly and joyously to our ap- 
pointed ends, conscious of life itself rather 
than of its warring phases. The cross is in 
203 



our hearts, but it means to us the blending 
rather than the opposition of its two ele- 
ments. We are not overcome by either 
joy or sorrow, but through their alterna- 
tion, as we move on swiftly to accomplish 
a will higher than our own, the heavenly 
vision is revealed to us, just as the distant 
landscape is continuously seen through the 
boards and gaps of a fence from a train in 
rapid motion. 

It is hard to say which aspect of the 
whole is the greatest, that of unity or that 
of diversity, power or love, God or Christ. 
Each appeals to us in turn as we some- 
times thrill with a sense of our own world- 
compelling power — which though limited 
is akin to the divine — or as on the other 
hand we tremble with a sense of our piti- 
ful weakness and constant need of help. 
To our hearts, surely, God as one, great in 
power and majesty, is less appealing than 
God as the stricken, suffering friend, bro- 
ther, and Saviour of men. Indeed, the more 
deeply we experience life the more divinely 
beautiful does this side of the whole, the 
humble, burden-bearing, patient side, ap- 
pear to us, — the side of tenderness and 
care for little things, which like the tiny 
alpine flowerets on high grassy slopes stands 
in contrast to the glacial heights of inac- 
204 



cessible purity and majesty that tower 
above, counterbalancing our thought of 
power with that of love. 

One caution we certainly need as these 
new thoughts of man's higher individuality 
are springing up in so many minds, and 
we find ourselves possessed of new powers 
and capacities. Because we have caught 
a glimpse of the whole, and in one sense, 
that is, in spirit, can identify ourselves 
with it, we must never forget that in our- 
selves we are but infinitesimal parts and 
must treat ourselves as such, never claim- 
ing absolute rightness or power of domi- 
nation except when these are clearly laid 
upon us by the whole. The strongest 
minds have always had the clearest con- 
ceptions of wholeness, and this, while giv- 
ing them great power, has often led them 
astray. The career of Napoleon is an in- 
stance in point. He saw the need for uni- 
fication, but made his own glory the final 
unit to be served. The Catholic church 
has the same conception of unity, the same 
unwillingness to see itself as a part. Also 
while we can perceive intellectually that 
all things, both good and evil, must have 
their place and explanation in the whole, 
we need to remember that only from the 
point of view of the whole can the rela- 
205 



tion of one to the other be rightly and safely 
seen. If we insist in the name of science 
on having a thorough knowledge of all that 
is in the world, no matter how morbid and 
debasing, there is nothing to stay our quest, 
but as the result of it we shall handle only 
a corpse. No, if we would have life, life 
for ourselves, life for our country, life for 
our world, we must seek and develop and 
believe in only the good. This turning of 
the world towards the light God demands 
of our enlightened wills. The angels, who 
are no longer pulled downward by the 
earth, may look with quiet eyes on suffer- 
ing, even on sin, because they know the 
outcome of it all ; but for us in our human 
capacity, as those who are struggling out 
of, and trying to detach themselves from, 
the material, the only safety lies in turning 
from evil and choosing the good with all 
our strength at every moment of our lives. 
Every artist knows that one of the great- 
est desiderata in painting is to keep the 
lights broad and simple, and not until he 
learns to do this does he find that the shad- 
ows are not nearly as dark as he at first 
supposed, and that the half-tones really 
belong to the light. Yet it is well for 
him to begin with a vigorous sense of the 
darkness of shadow. His experience offers 
206 



a curious parallel to the development of 
man's ethical ideas. At first he makes the 
lights very white and the shadows very- 
black, just as in old-fashioned novels the 
heroine was a paragon of virtue and the 
villain perfidious to the last degree. Afiier 
a while this treatment strikes him as inade- 
quate ; he feels a lack of relation between 
the two elements. He then begins to 
study the half-tones, the places where the 
dark and the light blend into one another. 
In doing this he is certain to carry too 
much of the dark into the light — to over- 
model his work, as the technical term is — 
until it loses all the beauty and distinction 
that was given to it, even by the baldly 
stated contrasts of his earlier endeavor. 
He is apt to get discouraged at this point, 
but if he pushes on a little further, and re- 
solves to keep the lights broad and simple 
whether he sees them so or not^ just because 
light is good and beautiful in itself, he 
will at last find that the facts are really in 
accordance with his new resolve, and that 
he had been led to exaggerate the dark- 
ness of the half-tones through prolonged 
scrutiny of them. Much life and literature 
to-day are in just this case. They are suf- 
fering fi-om an over-conscientious study of 
half-tones. But this is probably an inevi- 
207 



table stage in development. The beauty 
of the broad light — the faith of our youth 
— will at last reassert its claims, the shad- 
ows will fall back into their proper places, 
and we shall paint a picture made both 
luminous and true by a happy combina- 
tion of faith and experience. 



208 



VII. IMMORTAL LIFE 



'*So in man's self arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types of a dim splen- 
dor ever on before. 
In that eternal circle run by life : 
For men begin to pass their nature^s bound. 
And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant 
Their proper joys and griefs; and outgrow all 
The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade 
Before the unmeasured thirst for good: while peace 
Rises within them ever more and more. 
Such men are even now upon the earth. 
Serene amid the half formed creatures round. 
Who should be saved by them and joined with 
them." 

Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 




VII. IMMORTAL LIFE 

?T seems as if the unseen world 
of relation, lying as close to 
us, though less obvious to our 
senses than the world of fact 
or visible existence, and con- 
necting us with all life, past, present, and 
to come, might actually be that spiritual 
world of whose reality we would so gladly 
be assured. 

If so we need not seek for it above the 
clouds or beyond the gates of death, for it 
is with us here and now, pervading every 
atom of the world about us as the inner 
verity of all material things. We are no 
strangers to it, for we have been relying 
upon its laws at every moment of our 
lives. Without them, there could be no 
love or friendship, no achievement, no ex- 
istence even. All joy, every perception of 
beauty, the clinging touch of a baby's fin- 
gers, the perfume of flowers, a strain of 
music, dewy twilight glades, and the host 
of stars — all have power to thrill us be- 
cause they stir some fibre of this great nerve 
system of the universe, which vibrates in 
us and them alike. 

The closing of our eyes in death may 
blind us to material forms, which are the 

211 



outward embodiments of relation, but not 
to the essential truth of relation itself The 
Idea which is the basis of every form, and 
of which we ourselves are each a phase, 
must become yet clearer to us when its 
clothing of matter is cast aside. 

It seems almost needless to write of 
heaven and the immortal life in a separate 
chapter, because this whole book deals with 
the essential elements of them, and nothing 
can be affirmed of them in the hereafter 
that is not true of them now. If what we 
have said of the world of relation and of 
our part in the recognition of it, be true 
here, it is so simply because these are eter- 
nal verities. Hence there is no special 
preparation to be made for the life to come. 
It is simply the deepest secret of this pre- 
sent life. Love and truth are its essential 
elements now and always, and the largest 
relation is ever the most controlling. 

When the soul recognizes in God the 
object of its supreme allegiance, in that 
recognition it even here becomes immor- 
tal, since nothing can ever overrule or de- 
stroy the largest relation of all. The loss 
of the body cannot harm the soul because 
the body is only one expression of its life, 
and when that life has worn out and ex- 
hausted its first expression, it can doubtless 

212 



go forth to shape itself again into some 
nobler and more lucid form. 

The great cry of the human heart is 
for recognition — personal recognition — 
in the hereafter. It matters not so much 
from whom the recognition comes — God, 
Christ, our friends — all this is for the time 
subordinate to our great outcry for recog- 
nition of some sort, for, as our hearts' truest 
instincts tell us, without recognition there 
is no life. We must have some assurance 
of a returning wave of love, some promise 
that the unsatisfied longing of our hearts 
will meet a personal response. 

Does not our study of relation assure 
this to us as the truth of truths ? Recog- 
nition must be the very essence of the life 
to come, for even here to recognize, to give 
oneself, to be worn out in service, is to live. 
If all right relations are derived from and 
included in the largest Whole of all, then 
all the joys of human fellowship, all the 
closest ties of love that we have known, 
have been vital and glorious simply be- 
cause they had their place in this tran- 
scendent scheme of immortal life. They 
must therefore progress to an ever-fuller 
completeness through the eternal years. 

When a man keys his life by faith to 
its largest possible issues, it gives to him 
213 



even here a strange grandeur and outlook. 
Terrestrial proportions suffer change for 
him in view of it, human values readjust 
themselves, and though storm and disaster 
beat heavily about his footsteps, yet in his 
heart there is peace, and the " eternal sun- 
shine settles on his head." Heaven is no 
longer to him a place or a hope for the 
hereafter, but rather a state of being, an 
ever-present realization of immortal life, an 
eternal here and now, so vivid, so tran- 
scendent, that he estimates all other things 
by their relation to it. 

The truths of the inner world in a way 
contradict our perceptions of the external. 
As we study the outer world we meet only 
the manifestations of these inner truths, and 
these manifestations, time, space, etc., be- 
come the categories of our thinking. We 
assume that these categories are funda- 
mental, for not until we come into our 
inner relation with the truths themselves 
can we see that Life, eternal, immortal, in- 
visible, is the only reality, and that all cate- 
gories are conditioned upon life, rather than 
life on them. We see that time is only 
the expression of that necessary sequence 
in the development and manifestation of 
all the possible relations of life which is 
inevitable to our condition as finite crea- 
214 



tures who can never grasp all parts of the 
whole simultaneously, time being really 
measured by life, and not life by time. 
The same is true of spiritual space which 
does not, like terrestrial space, contain rela- 
tions, but like time exists because of them. 
< Sympathy is nearness in the deepest sense, 
and may bind two spirits closely even 
when seas roll between, while others who 
walk side by side may be widely sundered. 
Again, place is not something antecedent 
to a man which he occupies, but the sum 
of his perfected relations to the whole de- 
fines his place and condition. 

Such perceptions do not make this pre- 
sent world unreal to us, but enable us to 
deal with it victoriously by means of a 
deeper knowledge. We can so realize our 
beloved in the inner stillness that they 
make melody in our hearts even when a 
thousand miles away, and we can so with- 
draw in spirit from contact that is evil and 
uncongenial that it has no power over us. 
Again, our place no man can take from 
us, since it exists only because of us; and 
though all the powers of earth were set 
against it, all that is truly ours will find us 
in the end. 

We sometimes get hints of the spherical 
wholeness of life that startle us with their 
215 



strange beauty, as the music from an seolian 
harp arrests us in wandering through a 
ruined castle, or a whifF of enchanting per- 
fume ascends to us from the overgrown 
tangle of a deserted garden. These inti- 
mations come to us most frequently in 
days of pain and of change. So long as 
our life here seems complete and rounded 
in itself, and our sources of happiness fully 
assured to us, there is a certain smugness 
and superficiality about it all ; but when 
great changes come, when one we love 
passes into the unseen, when removal of 
residence or change of pursuit sets its seal 
on one period of our life, then, in the midst 
of the sadness that must inevitably come 
to us, since all change has a savor of death, 
there comes also a vision of the life we are 
leaving in which we see it as a whole, and 
appreciate the relation of its parts to one 
another, as was impossible while we our- 
selves were acting out the drama. Our 
past deeds, prosaic as they seemed at the 
time, take on an ideal fitness and beauty 
as we look back on them. All petty de- 
tails are sifted out, the bouquet, the pure 
quintessence only, remains. How gra- 
ciously we walked down those elm-shaded 
streets! How fittingly our life blended 
with the life of our city ! How happy the 
216 



choice by which at some decisive moment 
we stood firm when tempted to turn aside ! 
How enchanting those rides over the hills 
among the sparkling frost-jewels or the 
golden store of autumn I Everything is 
touched with poetry as the vision of the 
whole resurrects the past and glorifies it 
for us. 

And if the past were all, what keen 
pangs of regret would this lovely vision of 
its wholeness evoke ! But if we know that 
the secret of its beauty and consistency lies 
in the relation of all its elements to our own 
personality, then, since that personality is 
to go on to ever clearer definition of itself, 
we can move forward with glad assurance 
that the lovely but fleeting vision is but an 
earnest of that which is to come when our 
completed personal wholeness shall recon- 
struct for us, according to its true propor- 
tions, all the accumulated material of our 
earthly career. 

It is sometimes objected that as much of 
the picturesqueness of life comes from its 
errors, a heaven of righteous souls will be 
but a tame affair. Doubtless contrast will 
be always and everywhere an essential of 
beauty, and, if good and evil were the final 
contrast, this fear would be well founded. 
But if good is the positive and evil merely 
217 



the negative pole of being, then, when we 
are no longer exposed to the forces of dis- 
integration, there will still remain to us in 
the great positive, constructive Whole, 
with its dual elements, the material for 
every conceivable variety of beautiful ex- 
pression, as new situations give opportu- 
nity for more subtle adjustments of love 
and trudi. 



218 



CONCLUSION 



*' Nothing but the scientific method can in the long 
run enable us to reach that further point, outside both 
Christianity and paganism, at which the classical ideal 
of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored 
to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, per- 
chance, is the religion, still unborn or undeveloped, 
whereof Joachim of Flora dimly prophesied when he 
said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the 
kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of 
the Spirit was to be." — John Addington Symonds, 
Renaissance in Italy, 

*'In rivers cool send him to us ; 
In flames let him glow tremulous ; 
In air and oil, in sound and dew. 
Resistless pass earth's framework through. 

*^So shall the holy fight be fought. 
So come the rage of hell to nought. 
And ever blooming round our feet 
The ancient Paradise we greet. 

*' Earth rouses, breaks in bud and song 
Full of the Spirit, all things long 
To clasp with love the Saviour guest 
And oiFer him the mother's breast. 

*' Our eyes they see the Saviour well. 
Yet in them doth the Saviour dwell ; 
With flames his head is wreathed about 
From which himself looks gracious out. 

** To us a God, to himself a child. 
He loves us all, self undefiled. 
Becomes our drink, becomes our food. 
His dearest thanks, to love the good." 

NOVALIS. 




CONCLUSION 

2E may now ask what light the 
doctrine of relation throws on 
our present philosophical and 
religious problems V 
We find everywhere the em- 
piricist and the idealist, the pluralist and 
the monist, the believer in the immanence 
and the believer in the transcendence of 
Deity. The fact that these two types of 
thinkers exist, and always have existed, 
might in itself persuade us that the final 
truth cannot lie with either type alone, but 
must in some way be attained through a 
mutual adjustment of their opposing points 
of view. This adjustment must not be 
a compromise, for that would mean an 
atrophying of one type or the other, per- 
haps of both, and hence a curtailing of 
life. It must rather be a mutual recogni- 
tion, a vibration between the two, which, 
without impairing the integrity of either, 
shall resolve them both into a higher and 
more living truth. 

Madame James Darmesteter, in writing 
of Renan, expresses this idea of the vital 
interaction of opposites with her usual 
felicity. She says : " In his rare affirma- 
tions he never forgot that things have al- 

221 



ways their unseen side, which may possi- 
bly contradict all that we should predicate 
from those surfaces within our range of 
vision. For the human eye — and the 
mind's eye also — is so constructed that it 
cannot see every face of an object at the 
same time. Renan, however, saw them so 
immediately one after the other, as in a series 
of rapidly dissolving views, that his vision 
of these things was never simple, but 
blended, as it were, from a set of contraries. 
No aspect of Truth engrossed him so en- 
tirely as to exclude an instinctive divina- 
tion of its opposite. A sort of contra- 
nitency, — if we may use the word, — an 
elastic reaction against pressure, which be- 
came the main quality of his mind, assured 
him that the truth of one thing does not 
necessarily establish the falsehood of its 
apparent negation. The air through which 
we all see the world is in fact a sort of 
vivid prism, iridescent, opalescent, only 
habit has dulled our sense of it. But Renan 
kept in his mind's eye unimpaired that in- 
tellectual iridescence which illuminates the 
inner vision. The truth of his most con- 
sidered assertions is qualified with subtle 
reservations, and the unity of his mind, ex- 
ceptionally sincere and veracious, is made 
of a thousand diversities in fusion, as a 

222 



painter mixes his white from a medley of 
many colors." ^ 

The empiricist sees the world of men 
and things expanding inch by inch, pushing 
its experimental life ever one step further 
into die outer darkness, enlarging its bor- 
ders slowly but surely away from its original 
starting-point, corporate man relying ever 
more and more upon himself and his own 
deductions, and working towards an infin- 
itely differentiated human republic. The 
man of intuitions holds up to us an om- 
nipresent ideal, fragments of which lie at 
the basis of every existent form, and he 
assures us that this ideal must finally draw 
all differentiated forms up to itself in an ex- 
pression of perfect and harmonious beauty. 

Surely the living truth cannot dispense 
with either of these points of view. Man 
realizes himself only through the patient, 
steady advance and conquest of conditions 
that the empiricist points out to us. It is to 
be observed, however, that this realization 
of man by himself already means to him, 
not only the developing of the individual, 

^ One cannot suppose that Madame Darmesteter 
means that these conclading words are literally true of 
any but the Supreme Painter, whose pigment is light 
itself, but as the illustration of a principle the figure is 
very suggestive. 

223 



but yet more the recognition of man in his 
corporate capacity, in the growing sense 
that the common weal must take prece- 
dence of all private interests. What is 
this but an unavowed admission of the 
truth of the idealist, the law of relation, 
which is the voice of the whole — the 
inner, antecedent truth — making itself felt 
as a contradictory force to individualism 
at its furthest outposts, even though those 
who recognize the power of this inner truth 
decline to admit its priority and predomi- 
nance? The empiricist mind of to-day 
considers the principle of unification and 
consolidation a discovery of its own, and 
proceeds to apply it in business matters, 
with results that often, for the time being, 
work injustice. It has certainly laid hold 
of a great principle, and one that gives it 
tremendous power, but it needs the ideal- 
ist's perception of the high derivation of 
this principle to remind it that even the 
strongest combination for merely material 
ends is forever at the mercy of the greater 
and higher wholeness of the Spirit. 

We can see also that pluralism and 
monism are both essential attitudes of the 
human mind, neither side being able to 
hold the whole truth, " lest any man should 
glory," but each point of view stand- 
224 



ing always in debt to its opposite for 
that counterbalancing and vitalizing touch 
which transforms a dead conception into a 
living truth. 

The pluralist feels the drama and con- 
flict of life. He says, " If God were one 
He could make a better world than this. 
The world being what it is, I am forced 
to believe that there is another power 
which limits and balances God, and pro- 
duces this constant struggle." He sees 
man tossed between conflicting forces, and 
is inclined to be indignant with the monist, 
who, with large, reassuring, but perhaps 
somewhat vague views, seems ready to 
swallow him up without realizing how 
much of a difficulty he is disposing of 
The only gospel that the pluralist offers 
to suffering man is the advice to be brave, 
and thereby add one more to the chances 
of a majority of good over evil. Every 
man can, if he will, contribute his mite to- 
wards this tipping of the scale. 

The trouble with this advice is that the 
suffering soul lacks precisely the courage 
that the situation demands, and it is just 
because of his lack of it that he suffers. 
When he steps out of himself to throw his 
weight on the side of righteousness and 
hope, he is already almost out of his diffi- 
225 



culty ; and in taking this step, whether he 
perceives it or not, he is really acting on 
the creed of the monist, and trusting him- 
self to that higher unity which holds the 
resolution of all his perplexities. Plural- 
ist though he be, the sense of unity is deep 
within him, or the conflict could not cause 
him pain. It is because the opposing 
forces jar upon his sense of unity, and give 
no promise of final adjustment, that he 
suffers from them. Yet, being a sincere 
soul, he will rather take his chances in the 
midst of the drama, which appeals to all 
that is heroic in him, than give himself up 
to the contemplation of an ideal perfection 
of which there seems little enough evi- 
dence in the world about him. The im- 
mediate struggle at any rate is real, and 
he feels that here is the place for a man. 
Yet his interest in the struggle is really 
due to his underlying monism, his hope 
of bringing good out of evil, for only a 
devil rejoices in confusion for its own 
sake. 

The monist, on the other hand, insists 
upon the whole, and makes it the basis 
of all his reasoning. Starting with unity 
as a primal necessity, he says that evil 
must in some way contribute to good, and 
be resolved into it at last. For him there 
226 



is always the whole, both as an original 
affirmation and a final answer, and the 
pluralist's question as to " which whole " 
does not occur to him. He draws a circle 
which helps him define and arrange all 
that is within it, or at least to insist that 
everything in it is in some way ideally de- 
fined and arranged. He makes a system, 
but in so doing he inevitably stiffens 
thought and takes the life out of it, for all 
humanly devised systems are limited by 
the brain that has made them, and such 
limitation paralyzes. They have a spe- 
cious air of order and finality, but we must 
handle them delicately, and keep the chil- 
dren out of the room, for fear that a burst 
of fresh air and noisy laughter will shake 
them to pieces. Yet they do much for us 
in furnishing an orderly repository for our 
ideas when not in use. 

It can be shown that the creed of the 
monist is at the bottom no more independ- 
ent of that of the pluralist than the latter 
is independent of the former, for even in 
monism there are always two elements. 
Because he dwells on the adjustment of 
these elements, rather than on their con- 
flict, the monist is less painfully conscious 
of the omnipresent duality than the plu- 
ralist is ; yet he must conceive of his whole 
227 



as both the beginning and the end of 
things, and therefore see it in two capaci- 
ties, alpha and omega, germ and fulfil- 
ment. He thus looks towards it in two 
opposite directions ; and while he will prob- 
ably tell us that the two are one, yet a 
question between them remains, and the 
entire problem of human destiny may be 
said to hang on man's decision as to which 
of the two he will make his goal ; whether 
he will move forward in faith to higher 
development, or turn backward in despair 
to degeneration and final death. 

Thus it seems that neither the plural- 
istic or the monistic conception of the cos- 
mos is independent of the other, even in 
its original constitution. There is an in- 
tegrant relation between them, and each is 
necessary to the other. Pluralism is an 
eternal question, to which monism is an 
eternal answer, and we could not have the 
answer without the question any more 
than we can teach an unawakened intelli- 
gence, or feed a person who has no appe- 
tite. They seem to be two fundamental 
types of mind, of which monism represents 
the feminine and pluralism the masculine 
phase. Monism contributes the form, it 
is the shaping element, while pluralism 
contributes the vital quality. Life is born 
228 



of the relation between the two. Each 
must yield itself heartily to the other in 
order that together they may bring forth 
the living truth. 

Monism gives us definition, repose, and 
the assurance of victory, and lest these 
should seem to belong to God rather than 
to man, lest they should seem so remote 
from us, so independent of us and our 
struggle as to chill us to despair, or lull us 
in a selfish optimism, pluralism comes for- 
ward to supply the element of vitality and 
motion by pointing out to us the difficulty 
and struggle of life, and impressing upon 
us the tremendous import of its individual 
issues. The monist's conception is like a 
circle, limiting and defining; the plural- 
isms is like a line, moving on indefinitely ; 
combined they give us the living spiral. 
The monist's thought is like a picture, all 
relations seen under one aspect; the plu- 
ralist's is like music, with notes in se- 
quence. The pluralist teaches us the true 
value and importance of man, making us 
feel that only by our individual will and 
effort, by our constant preferring of the 
best over the second best, of the greater 
over the lesser truth, of the spirit over the 
flesh, shall the victory be won. The mo- 
nist teaches the true value and importance 
229 



of God, so filling all things with himself 
that no room is left for the devil, whose 
dark personality is but the shadow cast by 
man himself as he stands facing the Sun 
of Righteousness. Once persuade man of 
this, and the duality between good and evil 
disappears for him, because by the very 
act of believing he has stepped out on to 
terra firma under a clear sky, and has left 
the mists and delusions of the Walpur- 
gisnacht of self behind. All choices for 
him henceforth lie between two kinds of 
good, two phases of God. He may make 
many mistakes, but his feet are planted on 
solid ground, and from thence the two 
great wings of human thought may bear 
him swiftly, strongly upward. 

At this point we may meet the inquiry, 
" If then there is no real and fundamental 
evil, if sin is nothing but man's shadow, 
what has been the meaning of all our 
blood and tears ? What has been the use 
of man's age-long struggle with sin and 
suffering ? " Simply that only by means 
of these could we have reached that point 
in human development at which we can 
begin to see the light, and in the joy of 
the vision forget the agony of its birth. 
If it seems to us a cruel injustice that those 
who have gone before should have groaned 
230 



and travailed in the darkness that we 
might enjoy light and freedom, we can 
remember that, since the whole is inde- 
pendent of time, all these past lives must 
be in some way present in and with our 
own. Therefore as we pour our souls out 
in loving recognition of all within our 
reach, we are paying to the present and 
the future the debt that we owe to the 
past, and are hastening the time when all, 
past, present, and future, shall consciously 
share alike in the perfected life of human- 
ity. Sin for us here and now lies only in 
our refusal to yield ourselves to this inner 
demand of the whole for its own com- 
pletion by us through our recognition and 
allegiance. 

We err constantly by getting things out 
of proportion even when we are most in- 
tent on doing right. Our very determina- 
tion to do well may blind us to the wise 
and quiet guidance of the whole, which 
would overrule so much of our feverish 
activity. All this error is inevitable to 
our human point of view. The very self- 
hood which is our proudest possession, be- 
cause through it we are allied to the great- 
est Whole of all, is sure, until trained by 
much painful discipline, to lead us into 
excesses. But these are not sin, except as 
231 



they are intentional. Sin must lie wholly 
in an evil will : negatively, in a will not 
recognizing the larger guidance; posi- 
tively, in a will deliberately opposed to 
and defying that guidance. That such a 
will has a certain power to go on and 
achieve results is inevitable from the very 
conditions of spiritual space and motion. 
Right relation implies the possibility of 
wrong relation. The freedom that we 
have to move towards the right implies 
the freedom to move away from it. A 
soul may avail itself of this freedom, turn- 
ing towards evil, drawing others to join 
in its revolt, and making a great show of 
power and success. But there is just this 
difference between right relations and 
wrong relations, between good will and 
evil will, that right relations tend always 
towards stability and mutual reassurance, 
whereas wrong relations tend only towards 
contradiction and disintegration. This be- 
ing the case, wrong relations must finally 
die out, and exist only as negative quanti- 
ties in the perfect whole. 

When we at last realize that sin lies only 
in a rebellious will, and that there is no sub- 
stantial devil to dispute with God on equal 
terms for the possession of our souls, we 
wonder what it is that has so long seemed 
232 



to us like a devil and a living root of evil. 
We would like to understand how, if God 
has been from the beginning all in all, and 
all-loving, He can have permitted an oppo- 
site pole of his own being to fill us with 
bad suggestions and strike terror to our 
hearts. 

Recognition of the two great elements 
alone can give us a key to this great mys- 
tery. These two elements are coexistent in 
God, and equally divine; but on entering — 
or, one might better say, producing — the 
category of time, they must, from our point 
of view, have acted alternately. There 
must have been first a long outgoing, 
externalizing, matter-producing wave, in 
which, as it reached its limit, there was an 
ever-increasing potentiality of the returning, 
recognizing, spirit-producing wave which 
should counterbalance it and bind it back 
to the whole. This inner potentiality 
would at last, by the culmination of its 
ever-growing assertion of balance, set a 
limit to the outgoing wave. It would 
thus begin to stir in all matter an awaken- 
ing life, a dumb sense of relation, which, 
evolving through the lower orders up to 
man, would manifest itself in his mind as 
a sense of mystery, an awe of something 
greater than himself, which something, 

^33 



dimly foreshadowed at first, would only- 
after long ages, and much experimenting 
with false gods, simplify itself into a wor- 
thy conception of the divine Unity. 

We can see that both these waves are 
divine, but that alternately each must be 
subordinated to the other, so that, as we 
are now home on the tide of the returning 
wave, it is sin for us to will in the oppo- 
site direction. We may look backward 
sometimes to get our bearings, but it is 
dangerous to look that way too long. Both 
waves daily woo our recognition. Nature 
would draw us back into herself God 
would draw us upward to his heart. Man 
stands as a pivot between the two. If he 
chooses matter above spirit, he brings de- 
generation upon himself by his own choice, 
and darkness and chaos engulf him ; but 
if he chooses spirit, then nature licks his 
feet and yields him her secret, thankful to 
own in him her master and high-priest, her 
only hope of seeing God. She knows that 
the day of her supremacy is past, because 
the outgoing wave of creation has spent its 
force, and is properly present now only as 
a sub-element of that returning wave which 
is gradually awakening this planet to splen- 
did life. 

The world-stuff is potentially both mat- 

234 



ter and spirit, and we have, quite apart 
from the question of right and wrong, much 
power to modify its expression in either 
direction, making more of one or of the 
other as we may choose. The world is 
moving rapidly in the direction of spirit, 
both by means of us and in spite of us, 
which is a comforting thought ; but in our 
daily life and small choices we do much 
to spiritualize or materialize all with which 
we come in immediate contact We often 
heap up rich possessions until we learn 
how little beauty there is in them — how 
in fact they are only a care and a burden 
— except as they are truly related to our 
personality. A greater number of steam 
yachts, private cars, and country-houses 
than we can actually use, and more dresses 
than we can possibly wear, add nothing to 
our pleasure ; we can never get fond of 
them, and only things that we love and 
have a personal relation with can really 
give us pleasure. There is even a refined 
satisfaction in going without things when 
it is a matter of free-will and not of com- 
pulsion. As we discover this truth we 
learn to live more and more in the spirit, 
more in the ideas of things than things in 
themselves, and we find in such living 
great lightness and pleasure. 

235 



Matter will last as long as we want it to. 
We may be sure that the supply will meet 
the demand and even outrun it, for we 
know how the commercial spirit, which 
dwells in the material, tries in every way 
to anticipate and to create demand, invad- 
ing our privacy with its runners and sell- 
ing agents. But these are only eddies in 
the stream of progress, proof that we have 
not yet established things on their right 
spiritual basis. When we have done this 
we shall no longer waste the world-stuff 
by making it into useless material forms 
after all our needy brethren have been fully 
supplied with creature comforts. 

Prodigality of material has ever been 
nature's characteristic, and we can see how 
necessary this has been to man's develop- 
ment in the past, as a rich basis of affluent 
suggestion for all his instinctive choices. 
But we are now at a later stage of evolu- 
tion, and our perfected sense of relation 
should save us from waste, just as it enables, 
us to kindle a fire with three sticks of pine 
wood rightly placed, when a dull servant 
would demand a dozen to produce the 
same result. As brains save the demand 
for, and consequently the making of, use- 
less stuff, and love stops the selfish accu- 
mulation of more material by any one man 
236 



than he can rightly use himself and make 
serviceable to others, the world will be 
growing lighter, freer, and more joyous 
day by day. 

Since the whole, and only the whole, 
can guide us to the right choices in life, 
probably nothing is of more importance to 
us intellectually than the way in which we 
conceive this whole. The pluralisms con- 
ception furnishes the element of personal- 
ity. He may, and very likely does, deny 
the personality of God, because his sense 
of the opposing forces blinds him to the 
unity behind them; but of personality in 
itself he is very sure ; personality, suffering, 
struggling, brother-loving (or even brother- 
hating), as we know it here. The monist 
supplies a more abstract ideal, impersonal, 
unruffled, ordering all things for the good 
(or evil) of the whole, and though he may- 
be a pessimist, and may doubt if this re- 
sistless rule be one of love, he nevertheless 
furnishes to us an idea of that unity of the 
manifold which is essential as a framework 
to our conception of the eternal Person. 
When we let the passion of the pluralist 
infuse blood into the vast ideal of the mo- 
nist, we begin to appreciate what personality 
itself may be, greater than any single per- 
son or fixed form at any point, becoming 

237 



a person at its pleasure, but evermore a 
Spirit, a Life, an omnipresent Love, re- 
sponding completely to our every desire. 

Thus the two views interwoven, united 
in love, rather than separated in contro- 
versy, become constructive, and reveal to 
us the higher truth in religion as in every- 
thing else. So omnipresent is this duality 
of the human mind, so potent is the union 
of the opposing elements, so clear is it that 
without such union "was not anything 
made that was made," that if we were to 
seek for some figure, some material symbol 
to express in the most simple manner the 
coherence of all things, material and spirit- 
ual, we should find ourselves setting one 
line at right angles across another line and 
placing at their intersection a living heart. 

The cross is no arbitrary device ; it is an 
expression of the essential truth of life. It 
confi-onts us in every experience ; it can- 
not be escaped even by our philosophic 
reasoning; and could we break the material 
frame of things apart to discover its secret, 
we should still find the cross transpiercing 
it in every direction like a chiastolite. 
We have been in the habit of thinking 
that Christ, by the manner of his death, 
consecrated the cross and set it forever as 
the special symbol of the Christian life. 
238 



It may be truer to say that the cross itself 
is the fundamental thing, and that in the 
fulness of time it bore Christ on its bosom 
as a visible manifestation of its great per- 
sonal truth of the relation of opposites. 

The law of the cross is the great con- 
structive law of the universe. It is the law 
of sacrifice, but yet more the law of recog- 
nition and of life itself It is the law of 
sacrifice only in an incidental sense, only 
in so far as its demands break through that 
husk of selfishness which keeps us dead 
and apart. The severe lines of the cross 
are a bald statement of the fundamental 
truths that flower into every sort of beauti- 
ful expression. The two tendencies that 
they represent may melt by their loving 
union into the enchanting curves of the 
living vine, and put forth many a graceful 
leaf and tendril ; but unless, under all the be- 
wildering profusion of its growth, the stem 
lines of the cross still make themselves 
felt, the vine will return upon itself and 
twist into a tangled snarl, choking its own 
existence. 

Since this truth is so deeply seated, since 
it was present at the beginning of time, 
and will find its complete expression only 
when time shall be no longer, was it not 
to be expected that in the course of the 

239 



world's moral history some hint of it should 
appear in personal form ? When the in- 
dividual or self element had carried man 
very far in one direction, the Roman em- 
pire holding its proud unity of domina- 
tion over the world, the Jewish nation 
wrapping itself in its conceit of exclusive- 
ness and legal righteousness, the heathen 
peoples given up to the excesses of debas- 
ing passion, was it not probable — nay, 
inevitable — that the other element, that 
of relation and love, so long dammed up 
and held back by the excessive manifesta- 
tion of its opposite, should, by one great 
concentration of itself, send into the world 
— very possibly through the pure gates of 
a virgin's womb — a Life which should 
assert the predominance of love in the face 
of all opposition and death, and prophesy 
of its final victory ? 

The artist, under the pressure of a strong 
emotion, strikes off in a moment the rough 
draft of a picture that he will be years in 
bringing to completion by the slow pro- 
cess of adjusting each value to every other. 
In all this long labor he will never lose 
sight of the original sketch, and the finished 
work, glorious in its detailed perfection, 
will really have no more power in it — no 
more inner meaning — than was contained 
240 



in that first draft which was its germ. The 
life of Jesus of Nazareth was in moral and 
spiritual directions such a sketch as this. 
The Christ, the principle of relation as em- 
bodied in Jesus, set before a world sunk 
in darkness and sin the pattern of the 
Christ that is to be. His life was the ori- 
ginal scheme for the perfected life of this 
planet, whose unity when fully established 
shall make good its rightful place in God's 
great gallery of worlds. In the external, 
physical sense, his enemies had a speedy 
victory over Him ; but because in Him the 
Spirit of the whole was so perfectly incar- 
nate that no misuse of power, no legions 
of chaos and disintegration, could quench 
his faith in the essential solidarity of the 
human race and its oneness with God, He 
testified to this faith by praying for his 
enemies even from the cross to which they 
had nailed Him, and matched his loving 
recognition of them to their worst abuse of 
power. Thus, through Him, a new possi- 
bility came into the world, a scheme of 
being more ideal and exalted than any that 
had ever been thought of before, because 
it united in one living, loving recognition 
the greatest possible contrasts, holiness and 
depravity, God and man. It is taking us 
j^ all these many centuries to realize the full 

241 



scope of the design, and to give it complete 
expression in human life. 

We can see that there must always 
necessarily be two ways of conceiving of 
Deity, because the two persistent types of 
mind, which we recognize under different 
names in all the various departments of 
thought, must each see a somewhat differ- 
ent image. Like the slightly differing vision 
of our right eye and our left eye, they unite 
to give us a sense of the roundness and 
completeness of objects. Some minds find 
it pleasanter to think of God as immanent, 
others long to know Him as a person; and 
even the same soul may habitually rest in, 
and refresh itself with, the thought of God 
as an all-pervading and all-renewing energy, 
and yet at some sharp crisis of suffering, or 
some narrow passage through temptation 
and fear, may cry out to Him for an inti- 
mate personal response. Then the thought 
of Christ comes to its aid. 

The whole is both It and He. It is an 
infinite principle, binding this world to all 
the starry host in a chain of relations too 
vast for us to contemplate, and also, since 
this earth is a whole in itself, prescribing a 
positive and definite quality for it, a scheme 
of related values which determines the right 
place and conduct for every creature upon 
242 



it as conducing to the expression of its 
perfect individuality. It is to this perfect 
individuality, to the ideal Christ, that we 
must look for an intelligent and loving 
response to all our questioning and long- 
ing, and our recognition of Him will reveal 
to us his personal quality. The church 
has been right in holding to the personal 
conception of God as revealed in Christ. 
Without personality life falls asunder and 
all organic connection between the parts 
is lost. But the church has not seen her 
truth large enough. She has preferred the 
sketch to the picture. She has kept her 
eyes fixed on the life and death of Jesus 
of Nazareth, which, while it contained the 
potency of the whole Christhood of this 
earth, was yet in itself only the germ of 
its complete expression. In spite of her 
trembling faith, she still seeks the living 
among the dead, and, looking backward at 
the manger, the cross, and the empty tomb, 
she does not see that just before her, radi- 
ant in majesty, complete in power, stands 
the glorious form of the Son of Man the 
ideal but most real Christ of God, the 
eternal Fact, the perfect human Whole, 
awaiting our recognition, and assuring to 
even the least of us, as we open our hearts 
to Him, a station in his immortal life. 

243 



The world is in a much more hopeful 
state to-day than the pessimists would have 
us suppose. The serious people of the 
world, those who labor and who make, re- 
present all the elements of the highest truth, 
only these elements are divided among 
separate camps who are often mutually 
critical of each other. In art and literature 
we find at present the worship of relation ; 
in science that of fact. Each worship really 
implies the other, and when this is recog- 
nized, both may obtain, through such recog- 
nition, a higher vision. In art and litera- 
ture the wave of realism alarms us, but we 
may see in it the preparation for, and pro- 
phecy of, a returning wave of idealism 
which will raise our products to undreamed 
of beauty and power. The man of science 
confines himself to facts, but the patience 
and thoroughness with which he does this 
is really a testimony to his belief in the 
whole, and to his sense of the inevitable 
correlation between all the facts that go to 
make up that whole. He will not suffer 
the smallest detail to escape him, lest that 
particular detail, hitherto overlooked or 
held of no account, may prove in the end 
to be pivotal. Thus he is animated by a 
profound sense of relation, although this 
sense manifests itself just now in the study 
244 



of fact. The artist of to-day, on the other 
hand, seeking relation, movement, atmos- 
phere, and for the time somewhat careless 
of form and of the higher unities, exempli- 
fies that spirit of right relation between the 
parts by which alone the highest Unity of 
all can at last be attained. Thus both are 
really seeking the whole. 

These two, the scientist and the artist, 
are like two painters, one of whom is en- 
gaged upon a work of the imagination 
while the other paints contemporary life. 
The first, the scientist, dreams of some pos- 
sible composition more grand, more vital, 
more harmonious in the relation of its 
masses, than anything that has ever been 
seen hitherto. With the hope that he may 
some day realize this on his canvas, he 
makes endless studies, and experiments 
with all possible materials, until at mo- 
ments he almost loses sight of the true 
object of his labor. The other, the painter 
by profession, feeling instinctively that 
unity must be attained at any and every 
cost, will not trust himself to attack any 
subject whose vastness threatens to confuse 
his sense of the relations that compose it. 
In rightness of relation he puts his trust, 
and he will portray the smallest and mean- 
est thing in the world, if he can make it 

245 



live on his canvas by the sheer verity of 
its related values. A picture that does not 
express this rightness of relation is to him 
artistically immoral, no matter how high 
its ostensible suggestion. 

If the thought of the twentieth century 
can combine the attitudes of these two men, 
it will be able to paint, with all the world- 
stuff at its command, a living likeness of 
the ideal human being, the Christ that is 
to be. It will admit all facts, but it will 
put the highest possible construction upon 
them. It will draw the features of the por- 
trait from all that is noblest in human life, 
but it will shape these features, by its inner 
vision, to the image of that ideal whole- 
ness of which they but dimly prophesy. 
Its work at first will be largely empirical. 
It will throw together on the canvas such 
masses of light and shade, such forms and 
tones of color, as seem to belong to the 
picture. All will be rough, in some places 
harshly contradictory. Some spots will be 
too dark, others too light, and tiie drawing 
will be faulty. All this is inevitable ; for 
until the values are brought together with 
some approximation of the final effect, the 
artist cannot be sure that anything is abso- 
lutely right, because each portion depends 
on all the rest. But little by little, as man 
246 



works on, a certain coherence will be estab- 
lished. The face that he strives to render 
— his vision of the most majestic Whole 
that the mind can conceive — will be hu- 
man, because made in the likeness of man 
and woman, the highest forms he knows ; 
it will be divine, because animated by an 
intelligence and love of which man's clear- 
est vision and deepest rapture are but a 
stammering prophecy, and this face will 
at length smile back to him from the labor 
of his hands, and impart fresh courage. 
Then he can go on joyfully to finish his 
work, no longer in the dark. Then he 
can quickly distinguish the true from the 
false, for the whole will be in sight, the 
Personality will be clearly, though perhaps 
roughly, expressed, and the remaining im- 
perfections will stand out like flecks, nay, 
almost drop off of their own accord, so 
clear will it be that they do not belong to 
the world-picture. Such a hope as this may 
well inspire the creative energies of man. 

Socially too, it is not difScult to see that 
we have among us, even at the present 
day, both the elements of a perfect life. 
We have plenty of individualism, plenty 
of assertion of man's right to choose. The 
extravagance which so many shake their 
heads over, the search for objects of vertu^ 
247 



the magnificent entertainments, the lavish 
use of flowers, all testify to man's deter- 
mination to have whatever seems to him 
good. It is a sign of growth, though a 
coarse and lush growth at the best ; for we 
should remember that the making of ex- 
pensive and elaborate things, although it 
may occupy a disproportionate place in the 
social economy, is nevertheless, in itself, 
part of the great spiritualizing process that 
is everywhere going on, because it raises 
raw materials to a higher plane by making 
these expressive of man's thought and pur- 
pose. Probably nothing but having their 
fill of material splendor and finding how 
unsatisfying it is in itself, will convince 
people that only in limitation and relation 
to higher uses lies the secret of that very 
beauty which they seek so passionately and 
greedily ; that only as they themselves find 
their relation to the whole, and serve their 
day and generation therein, can the beauti- 
ful things they handle keep their freshness, 
instead of turning to dust and ashes. We 
may lament that this lesson is not learned 
faster, but we can comfort ourselves by 
seeing in all this individualism the sturdy 
assertion of an essential principle; that of 
fact, of visible existence, of the right of 
every creature to its own place. 
248 



To balance this self-assertion, there is in 
society to-day a great sense of the power 
of relation, and of the solidarity of man. 
This manifests itself both in selfish and in 
unselfish fashion, — in great schemes of 
business consolidation, in socialistic theo- 
ries, in plans for international alliance, in 
man's enlarging sense of responsibility for 
distant wrongs ; in his increasing care for 
animals, his growing love for nature, his 
thirst for travel, and in countless other 
ways. 

These two forces, the claim of the indi- 
vidual and the claim of the whole, inter- 
act to form the secular or world-spirit of to- 
day, a common consciousness of civilized 
man, so vital as to form an appreciable 
entity which all recognize; which many 
rejoice in because they find through it an 
enfranchisement of unexpected power in 
themselves, and a new gospel of joy in 
nature and contemporary life, while others 
fear lest, in its youthful exuberance and 
smiling self-assurance, it should lead man 
away from his highest good. 

Yet this world-spirit is indeed the Spirit 
of the whole now beginning its reign on 
earth. It is yet in its infancy, unconscious 
alike of the travail of its birth and of its im- 
mortal destiny. It needs to be explained 
249 



to itself; to be taught the divine origin of 
its budding powers; to be shown that it 
holds its present being, with all its lusty, 
splendid life, only by virtue of laws that 
will force it by steady, resistless pressure to 
ever higher and more spiritual issues. Find- 
ing itself alone upon the strand of that 
troubled ocean of life out of whose throes 
it was born, it still toys with the pebbles at 
its feet. It holds the shells to its ear and 
listens to the murmuring voices of its past. 
Yet even as it does this it sees above and 
around it a new creation, in which it must 
soon arise to accomplish the meaning of the 
Whole; to become the living embodiment 
of its own highest law of Love, and to link 
together both past and future in one pre- 
sent realization of immortal Truth. 



250 



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